Najah Albukai, drawing against oblivion in Syria
Audio 02:29
Syrian artist Najah Albukai.
AFP
By: Sarah Tisseyre
6 mins
It was 10 years ago.
The beginning of the Syrian revolution repressed since in the blood by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
On this occasion, the Syrian designer Najah Albukai presents his works at the Fait et Cause gallery in Paris and in a book called Tous witnesses, with texts by personalities from the art world such as Wajdi Mouawad, Olivier Py, Elias Sanbar or Sebastiao. Salgado.
Exiled in France since 2015 after having suffered detention and torture in Syria, Najah Albukai draws against oblivion.
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They are half-naked men carrying a corpse in a blanket.
Another, his back twisted by his tormentors on a backless chair.
Drawn in ballpoint pen or gouache, the works of Najah Albukai tell about all the tortures inflicted on prisoners in jails of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
He himself spent 70 traumatic days at the 227 Military Intelligence Service Center in Damascus in 2014. “
This is a corridor we went through twice a day to defecate.
At the end of the hall, there was a toilet.
By the way, there were young people hanged by the hands and a soldier who hit them with a cable
”, tells us the artist.
Najah Albukai's drawings are peopled with gaunt bodies, men with empty eyes, crammed together.
“
We were about 3,200 without ventilation, without a nurse, without soap.
With the torture, the prisoners were covered in blood and their wounds became infected.
Some got sick and others died under torture.
I was requisitioned to unload the corpses in the trucks…
”, testifies the designer.
Najah Albukai was professor of drawing at the Fine Arts of Damascus when he joined the first demonstrations in March 2011. “
We felt encouraged by the wave in Tunisia, then in Egypt and Libya.
The fact that the population has started to come out, this spark of freedom, no one can prevent it.
The fact of having visited Europe - I studied in Rouen - this surge of freedom captivated me
.
"
Arrested, imprisoned several times, then released thanks to the mobilization of his wife and family, Najah Albukai went into exile in France in 2015, after a short stop in Lebanon, where the urgency of drawing was imposed.
“
When I arrived in Beirut, I started to draw with all the means I had: scraps of paper, posters, ... It was a sort of vital need.
Frankly, my goal was not to exhibit but to testify,
”he tells us.
Testimonies against oblivion, these drawings have since also revealed in Najah Albukai a very talented artist, worthy heir to Goya, in his way of engraving the suffering of the tortured.
“Tous Témoins”, an exhibition and a book on the drawings of Najah Albukai;
it is also an evening broadcast live Saturday from the Maison de la Poésie, with the same Najah Albukai the guitar and at the Oud, Nancy Huston at the piano, or texts read by Laurent Gaudé, Philippe Claudel, and the director Wajdi Mouawad.
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