Though news tends to get ascribed to particular events happening on a certain day at a certain time, a look through 2015 reveals that much of what made the headlines was a continuation or culmination of events that have unfolded over a number of years: the Syrian conflict, the march to marriage equality, the debt crisis in Greece, the Black Lives Matter movement. Though not “art news,” these and other stories touched the lives of many people, including artists. Here we highlight nine whose work can help parse the year’s biggest stories from a perspective not usually found in the columns of a newspaper’s front page.
Conflict. War. Revolution. Whatever name you place on what is happening in Syria, the scale of its horrors cannot be underestimated. Since the Arab Spring in 2011, Syria has been torn apart, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions of people. Some of those fleeing the conflict have gone to Europe, in total amounting to the largest influx of refugees the continent has seen since World War II. Still others fill the refugee camps of neighboring Arab countries struggling to cope with increased demands on infrastructure. In the West, the nuances of the conflict’s history and dynamics are poorly understood. Rather, it is discussed mainly in terms of how it created the rise of ISIS while the discourse around the refugees is tainted by racism and Islamophobia.
One artist whose work can help shift the way the conflict is perceived in the West is Syrian, Dubai-based Tammam Azzam.
