Hazara Nation

Vancouver Sun
Kevin Griffin

It's one of those images that hits you with a bang.

The assault of red against the black and white background makes your heart jump. By covering the eyes, bridge of the nose, and forehead, it obliterates the parts of the face that register emotion and personal identity.

The brutality of the red contrasts sharply with the softness of the subject who looks like an male or female adolescent wearing a baseball cap. You could imagine the sandy-haired youth spending the summer eating hotdogs and playing baseball.

The person is wearing a U.S. flag over the mouth and the lower part of the face. It's the kind of thing worn by someone protesting against censorship, the war in Iraq or any of the empire-building wars the U.S. has started in the past 200 years. The red paint drips like blood on the youth's face, recalling all the blood that's dripped on the U.S. since its violent birth as a republic.

The title torques up the emotional content of the image even more. It's called Eyescream Sunday, a play on the wholesome all-American dessert, an ice cream sundae.

Oddly enough, the image isn't crassly anti-American propaganda. By wearing the U.S. flag like an outlaw from the Wild West celebrated in Hollywood movies, the youth is situated as a modern American outlaw taking on a contemporary version of the sheriff. There's a sadness about Eyescream Sunday, as if the protester is part of a recurring cycle of violence of which he or she is unaware.

The mixed media work illustrates perfectly the name of the exhibition at the Back Gallery Project that it's a part of: Can You Not See. The 18 paintings and mixed-media works in the exhibition are by Raif Adelberg, an artist, designer and publisher Made Magazine, a Vancouver-based art book. As a designer, he's created the line of clothing called Richard Kidd.

For Can You Not See, Adelberg is exploring the legacy of North American colonial history and 1940's European imagery in popular visual culture.

In his artist's statement, Adelberg said his work is looking at actual and implied emotional and physical domination and how the culture of fear works to control and deflect dissent. The Back Gallery Project is at 109 West Cordova, under the shadow of the new Woodward's Block. The exhibition continues to Saturday, May 31.

A work in progress about a different but related kind of representation is being presented next Wednesday at Centre A at the corner of Carrall and West Hastings. Vancouver-based artists Jayce Salloum and Hazara-Afghani artist Khadim Ali will be showing parts of their work-in-progress (the heart that has no love/pain/generosity is not a heart). The work will premiere at the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art in Kelowna Monday, June 9 to Thursday, July 31.

The collaborative project of the two artists focuses on Afghanistan's Bamiyan valley where the Taliban destroyed two ancient Buddha statues in 2001. Western media accounts suggested that the Taliban destroyed the statues due to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. But another possibility has to do with the Hazara people who live in the region. The Hazara are an Asiatic-looking ethnic group believed to be descended from Genghis Khan. As a minority group, the Hazara have been routinely massacred and discriminated against by the Taliban. The statues may have been destroyed because the Taliban didn't like having huge Hazara-looking figures looking down on them.

Their collaborative project was made possible through a grant from the Arts Partners in Creative Development, one of the arts funding initiatives made possible by the 2010 Olympics.

It will be shown at OurTube on Wednesday, May 28 at 8 p.m. The moderator for the slide show and talk will be Haema Sivanesan, director/curator of South Asian Visual Arts Collective in Toronto. Centre A is at 2 West Hastings.

A play on YouTube, OurTube is meant to be a place where artists can share their video and work with others while talking about it.

There is no charge to attend OurTube which is held on the last Wednesday night of the month.

More information is at 604-683-8326 and www.centrea.org.