“It was in the 1930s that Mallowan and Agatha Christie dug out the Grey Eye Temple of Tell Brak in north eastern Syria. This temple revealed never seen before statues and idols from the first urbanized societies known to mankind. Mouthless as they were, the idols could not tell of their purpose and so speculations arose - are they female deities, representations of the dead or an all seeing eye-god? But the eyes simply kept watching us and so continued the excavations for answers in the grey brickwork. Archaeologists came to return every tenth year to the site until the Syrian civil war unraveled and the conflicts redeemed further excavations too perilous. The site was inso transformed into a battlefield with IS facing PKK / YPJ (often men against women). Strangely enough combatants from either side wore the same camouflage - the UCP: a camouflage pattern consisting of tiny squares in three grey nuances. This color scheme conceived by the Americans was designed for the same area of operations and relied on the idea of the universal: one camouflage for all terrain. However it turned out as a failure and rendered soldiers as monochrome grey surfaces in the scenery. The camouflage did not make them look like grey matter but made them into grey matter - many shot in the face or more precisely in the temple bone, one of the few exposed parts which are not covered by kevlar or helmet - but this is also the spot which would have shown the first signs of ageing - if they had lived. In the grey temples.”
Published on the occasion of an exhibition at NeverNeverLand, Amsterdam; collaged archive materials (images and texts in English and Cuneiform) and reproduced art works weave together the distant and recent past of Syria.
Sewn, 27 x 20 cm, 48 not numbered pages, Amsterdam 2019
