The Tunnel

The Tunnel is a mixed media art installation. The story is that of an exiled refugee who has escaped to a new country, someone trying to assemble the pieces of his old life, and soulfully attempting to make sense of how things have shifted and spiralled.

Using photos of Old Damascus from my last visit in 2011, and my own reflections on the countless displaced Syrian people around me, I reflected on how images from Damascus were stripped of their colours, as were our lives in exile. I wanted to express the displacement and how cruel exile is when violence back home is ongoing. Recreating the photos in red and grey, and working with ink, wires and broken glass to represent this person’s redefined vision of home, short texts expressed his conflicted thoughts and unanswered questions.

It was installed as a dark, black tunnel, between 10m high black curtains – visitors entered to find text and artworks suspended on the right and left, but could not exit at the end, finding instead only the wall and the stark statement, handwritten in charcoal: “There is no black and white in the Syrian conflict. Only shades of grey and too much red”.

With this artwork, I bring to light a glimpse of reality, the multiple layers of darkness that accompany humans in exile, and the impossibility of reaching closure in the shadows of an ongoing conflict. The suspension of these images and words in the space reflects how this man is suspended between injury and an unknown cure.