Revisiting artefacts, memories and ideas from both his own past and that of his homeland of Syria, Issam Kourbaj explores ideas of regeneration in his latest exhibition, Urgent Archive at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.
“My mother was such a wonderful, resourceful person, a poet in her own way – she taught many things to me without knowing.” Canvas is talking to Issam Kourbaj in the smallest room of the three main contemporary galleries of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Not all visitors will make it up to this archive space, separate to the two ground floor galleries which are packed with the Syrian artist’s playful sculptural collages, but it is arguably the key to unlocking much of the meaning condensed within his work.
Central are the key biographic staging posts tracing Kourbaj’s migration from Sweida in south-west Syria, to study fine art in Damascus, then architecture in St Petersburg, then on to the UK for a degree in theatre design at Wimbledon School of Art. But the room reveals much more, helping to understand moments of self-identity, the emergence of his artistic practice, and familial importance – including images painted by his late wife Candelaria Capurro Ferrer. Kourbaj recalls a story about his mother: “We went to an orchard and a tree had fallen, so she took some pieces of clothing and, using them like a bandage, repaired the branches – and the tree came back to life. Just watching that action, one takes quite a lot in as a child.”
The exhibition downstairs, Urgent Archive, is a deep study in such repair from unexpected material. One of the rooms indeed looks like an archive, a geometric U-shape of tall storage shelving filled with countless assorted, seemingly disconnected, objects. Each is numbered and a pink piece of A4 helps visitors navigate the title of each stored item – but each of these items carries deeper meaning than a title can convey. Each is a discrete part of a Gesamtkunstwerk that Kourbaj has been building daily for 13 years, since the Syrian people’s protest on 15 March 2011 led to the Assad regime’s ongoing violent response.
It is not possible to list all that is displayed, but the archive includes: two analogue cameras facing each other, interlocked like Brâncuși’s The Kiss (“they are both devastated by war and still able to have that connection”); a pile of sole-less shoes, referencing how border police can remove and destroy children’s shoes; packages of Syrian wheat seed varieties; hand-made mud bricks; a plumb line formed of wheat seeds and a bullet; a collection of postcards for the children of Gaza.
“Typically the word ‘archive’ is a fixed object, whereas I would like to revisit the idea and bring it to the present, or even the future,” the artist says of the title and gallery infrastructure. The issues of war and violence explored within his work are still present not only in Syria, but across many Middle Eastern states, including the ongoing crisis in Palestine. “I feel that exhibitions are static,” Kourbaj explains, “but I felt the nature of the conflict is ongoing, so how can I bring that into the gallery and work with it?”
Urgent Archive is not static. The artist comes in each day to change, add, move and edit the works. A calendar has a page removed, stamped with the words ‘Another Day Lost’ and then added to a pile under a sand timer on its side. Each day a date is sewn onto a tent hung on the wall like a flaccid sail, adding to rows of over 4750 dried fruits that appear like text, each marking a further day since the Syrian uprising. Kourbaj plans to plant trays of wheat seeds and place them on the very top shelf of the unit, unseen by the public until the seedlings grow tall enough to peek into view. “Everything on display is waiting for something to happen, or it has happened, or something is happening,” he says. Two days after Canvas visited was the anniversary of the uprising, for which Kourbaj was presenting a day of performances and actions, some in collaboration with his son Mourad, a recent graduate of Glasgow School of Art.
Wheat seeds are important to the artist, and recur throughout the show. Monitors capture durational images of a wheat seed’s roots growing under the microscope, and three large digital prints of burnt seeds are presented on lightboxes. Outside the gallery – as well as at Kew Gardens and Cambridge University Botanic Garden – wheat is growing. It will be harvested as part of the project, as Kourbaj explains. “The whole idea of the archive comes from the seed, because seeds are an archive of the future.” Then, quoting from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s text I See What I Want, he asks “Is it from a grain of wheat that the dawn of life shines … and the dawn of war?”
That the opposites of life and death can be born from the same roots feeds Kourbaj’s interest in visual and written wordplay, where double meanings and conflicting language dance together, testing values and confronting truths. Such aesthetic juxtaposition is also present in his work All But Milk (2023–24), in which a series of shallow shelves supports a grid of baby milk bottles.
From a distance it reads like an historic chemist’s display, although an art audience might see elements of Damien Hirst’s pharmaceutical grids in it. Up close, however, it shifts. Where Hirst fetishises, these vessels are sinister – each bottle containing a unique, child-unfriendly material, all of which are listed below in handwriting on the wall. “Inside is all but milk,” Kourbaj says. “It’s violent – excrement, blood, razor blades – anything you put inside a child’s milk bottle is charged 1000 times.” The work is undoubtedly conceptual and confrontational, but the artist adds that “I like the idea that I’m a painter, and I could see the painterly quality.” However, these bottles are no Morandi.
This shift in meaning is central to Kourbaj’s practice, whether that be in function, proximity or, as runs through much of his work, language. Another recurring motif is the phrase “Leave to Remain”, political English terminology encountered by those seeking to immigrate to the country, first receiving “Leave to Enter”, then “Leave to Remain for One Year”, and hopefully, finally, “Leave to Remain Indefinitely”. “When I received ‘Leave to Remain Indefinitely’ in 1994, it was a big thing,” Kourbaj recalls. “It’s almost like you earned your place in the universe, and I felt how many people struggle to get to these few words.”
It is a phrase used across more than 15 of his works since he used it in a 2020 poem, and it pops up at Kettle’s Yard in carved ink stamps, handwritten on the back of postage stamps (“If you need to smuggle a word out of prison in Syria, you would write it on the back of the stamp.”) and in a video work, where it is translated into Braille as a series of dots. A uniquely English play on words, it was a dilemma for Kourbaj – who speaks three languages – to translate into Arabic: “Would I translate it as legal language or the actual meaning?”
Fundamentally, Kourbaj is a translator as much as an artist. Objects he finds in the local rubbish dump, or in the unsellable storage of charity shops, is empowered with new meaning in his hands. Central to it all, and the key to his playful yet profound approach, may be a family member he never met, Uncle Suleyman. “He converted unexploded French bombs into spoons,” says Kourbaj. “Imagine what a powerful thing for a child, to eat from those spoons and know that such nurture came from a destructive object?”
Issam Kourbaj: Urgent Archive runs until 26 May 2024
