"CHRISTIAN WAR BOOTY"
ERECTION OF THE CROSS - Artwork series
Few years ago in one exhibition I held in Alès, a friend asked me if I am Muslim. When I answered "yes", he asked why I was making paintings of Biblical inspiration. At that time I remember I did many images on Christian icons:the Virgin, Jesus, Saint Sebastian, Saint Georges etc..
I said: ”You know when my Nubian ancestors were building cathedrals in the Nile valley, yours were busy running after wild boars. ”
We laughed but I felt that explaining the religious history of the Nile valley would not help. So I shifted to what seemed to me a more convincing argument. I tried to explain the geopolitics of religion in our world!!(May Allah forgive my vanity). When Europeans spread capitalism in extra-European societies, this action affected the European culture as well as the cultures of the societies dominated by Europeans. The “clash” metamorphosed the Bible in an instrument of political domination in the hands of colonial authorities, but the same Bible metamorphosed into an instrument of liberation in the hands of anti colonial theologians. God belongs to the poor according to Gustavo Gutierrez ((1971; A Theology of Liberation).
Katib Yacin,(1929-1989), the Algerian writer, once said to his patriotic Algerian friends who blamed him for writing in French, considered as the language of colonizers: «French language is a war booty!”
This brilliant idea of sharing the war booty between the winners and the losers of the colonial war perverts the whole cultural configuration of the world built by European colonialists and imperialist undertakers from R. Kipling to S. Huntington. To extend Yacin’s idea, I would say: the whole European cultural tradition is a war booty in which I situate myself as a legitimate heir to all the human cultural fortune that the European tradition could encompass, including non European traditions. Being the heir of the European cultural tradition is also a big risk because from time to time you discover a skeleton in the cupboard! So you have to be critically attentive to the nature of your inheritance because you can not choose among what dead people might have bequeathed to their unexpected heirs !
The moment for a choice arrives afterwards when we examin what the European civilization bequeathed humanity,(Democracy, Science, and Arts, neighbouring Slavery, Nazism and colonialism).
I think this is what I am trying to do through my way of being in the world. I am trying to choose life against death and it is not that easy . I think life and death are equally incorporated in the objects of our inheritance.In this connection I see my paintings as an attempt to work out a human personal choice. We get caught every day in the deluge of propaganda images invading our vital environment. You just can’t close your eyes (even if you do you will keep seeing images!), so, keep your eyes open to each and every kind of images with the intention to render them back to the world, image for image and eye for eye. Seeing is the continuation of war with other means (Clausewitz), if you see what I mean.
--- Hassan MUSA, October 2020.