On Monday 28th November, REESAH hosted Murad Subay. Originally from Yemen where he grew up, Murad is a street artist who started to paint at the age of 14. He launched his first street art campaign in 2012 right after the revolution began in Yemen. Since then, Murad has launched 11 campaigns. The last one was « Prison Blood » in Paris.
He was awarded by multiple prices, like the “Art for Peace” award from the Veronesi Foundation, an Italian Foundation which congratulates one artist each year for promoting peace in the world. Eventually, he gave a speech at the Paris Peace Forum earlier in November.
Murad Subay has always used his art to denounce the war in Yemen and the living conditions of the population, while avoiding taking sides with any of the belligerents. Often compared to Banksy, he nevertheless invites anyone who wishes to paint alongside him in the street to participate in his work.
The lecture started by the diffusion of a short video realized by Abdurahman Hussain, introducing Murad and his work on the ground. This video showed us how he’s working: on ruins, with the people, in a country that has gone into hatred.
Then Murad started to describe his work in three major periods. On the first period, his aim was to invite the people to design the campaign with him. He painted on one great line in Sanaa, separating the pro and the anti-revolution. However, he was not allowed to paint everywhere and had to keep a good contact with the authorities for getting the permission to do so. There is no more state in Yemen, so artists like him need to discuss with powerful de facto authorities.
Murad likes to paint in places where there used to be hatred slogans on it, in order to cover them with his art. Many people joined the movement. They even called it the “Revolution Colours”. After that, other campaigns started. After that, other campaigns started. In 2012, "Revolution Walls" came to encourage the population to cover the walls of the old town, where even soldiers participated.
Another campaign was really significant: “The walls remember their faces”, which lasted from September 2012 to April 2013 about enforced disappearance. 800 faces of missing persons were painted in 4 different cities - Sanaa, Ibb, Aden and Ta'izz - while Murad was working with families of missing relatives. He notably saw these families' obsession for finding them. For example, he met Mutah Aleyriani, a man who returned but had been missing since 1982. All of the people who were declared as missing were of various origins but had in common the fact of publicly announcing their political opinion. Later, Murad lost permission to paint on city walls, but around a hundred people protested with him, supporting him in his move. He was therefore gradually rehabilitated.
After that, he led the "12 hours" Campaign between July 2013 and June 2014, to expose child recruitment and betrayal. The "Ruins" Campaign followed from September 2014 to May 2018. Murad started to paint on different walls: hospitals, schools, houses... A major piece he painted in 2016 in Sanaa is Assassination Eye. This triptych represents a target getting closer and closer. It symbolizes the political events and pressures that happened to Murad, his friends, journalists, other dissident opponents, etc.
Also, Murad described "Family portrait", a 2015 artwork that he painted after a house was totally destroyed and the family inside was killed. This is a frame with a family portrait and a raven above, symbolizing death and war. The artist met the father, only survivor, and told us that it was strange to meet a traumatized person. There was no feeling on his face, neither emotions nor any other ability to express anything.
Murad presented a lot of its work separately, so we could see that he became more and more politicized by denouncing war through the years. One good example is "Fuck War" a piece of art he made on a ruin, showing a guitarist with only one guitar string and the middle finger left, sitting on a TNT barrel.
He also wanted to express the trauma of his people, which is now totally empty from feelings because of all the violence it is exposed to everyday. "Hollowed mother", painted in 2019 in London exhibit this traumatised state where a person can be, even beyond sadness.
In 2015, always animated by his desire to meet people around art, Murad created the Open day of Art, an annual event that happened not only in Yemen but in a lot of other places in the world - Madagascar, Paris, Seoul, Verona etc…
Then, Murad left Yemen in 2018 and started working in Europe, in Paris, London, Berlin… It’s important for him to show the war to Europeans who often don’t know what happen in Yemen. And because somehow, a lot of occidental governments take part in conflicts.
Then Murad wanted to answer questions of the assembly. Here are a few questions that where interesting.
You send a lot of powerful messages through your art pieces, are you afraid in Yemen?
I was born 19 years old before the revolution, my brother was a journalist in 2014 and he has been sentenced to death. All my family is composed of activists. I started by leading demonstrations inside of my university but later, the revolution came. Actually, I was already prepared to fight and protest. When they shot my brother, I saw it as a message. He spent 30 days in hospital, and now he lives in Egypt.
How do you feel about the comparison between you and Banksy?
I’m honoured, of course. But that doesn’t give the full image of my work. Mine is a little less political, more about denouncing war in general.
What are your next projects?
It’s not going to be about politic because I’m not in my country. I have to be careful when I talk about local issues. I could've been interested on working about Afghanistan before Taliban took power back but now, I can’t come back there. Maybe more about Myanmar, Libya, or Soudan. But it would be in the next ten years because I don’t have tools to travel right now. But I know I have to do it, it’s my purpose in life.
Written by Camille Chambon
© RÉESAH
