Partners in Crime

Banksy invites Arab artists to participate in his Dismaland

Huda Beydoun, Tagged & Documented from Documenting the Undocumented Series (2013). C-print Diasec Mounting. Courtesy of the artist and Ayyam gallery.

With text by Marina lordan.

This summer, photographers Tammam Azzam, Ammar Abd Rabbo, and Huda Beydoun took part in the notorious British street artist, Banksy’s latest pop-up festival. Dismaland was secretly built at a derelict seaside lido in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, in the United Kingdom. Taking over the abandoned leisure facility, Banksy’s cynical twist on Disney’s amusement parks, where the highlight is a fire-ravaged fairytale castle, brought together 46 international artists.

Tammam Azzam was featured with Freedom Graffiti, an emblematic digital work that gained the artist international recognition after it went viral through social media in 2013. The image is from his series called Syrian Museum, and it projects Gustav Klimt’s The kiss onto a Syrian war-torn building as an embellishment of Azzam’s devastated homeland.

Fellow Syrian photographer Ammar Abd Rabbo presented Aleppo, Into the Wild— a photographer that portrays an inhabitant of the Syrian capital riding his motorbike though a crumbling street while cloths stretched between buildings are meant to protect him against stray bullets. Abd Rabbo’s work shifts the focus from combat scenes to the unexpectedly ordinary and yet perilous routines of Aleppo’s inhabitants. It measures the extent of the city’s destruction, all while highlighting the artist’s visual storytelling abilities.

Huda Beydoun took part with four works form her Documenting the Undocumented series, in which she digitally included Mickey’s ears, Minnie’s bows, polka dots, and yellow shoes onto photographs of illegal immigrants taken in Jeddah. Behind the protective veils of the Disney props, Beydoun’s stratified symbolism reveals a courageous yet subtle critique that links pop culture, graffiti, and social issues observed in the artist’s native country.

Following its sojourn in the British seaside resort, Banksy announced that all Dismaland’s timber structure and fixtures will be disassembled and shipped to Calais, France, re-purposing his so-called ‘bemusement’ park. There, they will be used to erect shelters for the thousands of refugees that have set up camp in the area surrounding the French port.