SYRIA STATEMENT

In 2016, having spent a decade making work about the forced migration from Berlin in the 1930s, I suddenly found my project linked to a present-day crisis: Berlin had become a destination for refugees rather than a place to flee. I could no longer consider Berlin’s relationship to the experience of exile and place, identity and culture, without thinking about Syria. In September 2016, I volunteered at Flughafen Tempelhof, then Berlin’s largest refugee camp. I began traveling frequently to Berlin to meet with displaced people, primarily from Syria, who were extraordinarily generous with photographs, videos, and stories of their former homes. I embarked on a new body of work with the aim of representing statelessness visually, conveying displacement, fragmentation, and strength.