Mute: Care aesthetics in the work of Khaled Barakeh

In this presentation, I will discuss the mixed-media public art installation MUTE (2020-), by the Syrian artist Khaled Barakeh and how he is using art as a reparative gesture. I will use the ‘care aesthetics’ concept (Thompson 2022) as a framework for my analysis. Care aesthetics proposes that care itself is a practice with aesthetic qualities, whether done by health care professionals, artists, activists or everyday citizens in their engagements with participants, communities, or the material world. Care aesthetics questions how artistic processes make care possible – and where they limit or make it less likely. Care aesthetics suggests we need to attend to the care of artists, participants, audiences, and our environment to make practices more equitable, accessible and inclusive – and ultimately able to respond to the carelessness often evident in the societies in which these practices take place.

Barakeh created 49 figures for the installation, all dressed in the ordinary clothes of Syrian activists living in diaspora that were collected through an open call. The artist chose for the figure heads to be decapitated and reconstructed to look inside the bodies bringing back all the memories, traumas, and anguish, turning the faces into horn-like openings that scream everything that had passed and maximizing the voices that were muted. I argue that Barakeh’ art form itself enacts care and that the public installation centres marginalised cultural lenses (of migrant and refugee communities) that are traditionally in tension with essentialist, racialised and colonised models of care.