Wonderland

The ongoing European migrant crisis counts as one of the major humanitarian emergencies of the twenty-first century: millions have been displaced from the Middle East and northern Africa and made their way into Europe, facing perilous conditions both en route and at their precarious sites of arrival. Their stories – told with differing degrees of accuracy and objectivity through the media, documentary forms or art – repeatedly point to the difficulties of mediating and relating such experiences. Erkan Özgen’s video Wonderland reflects on the ineffability of trauma. The short video introduces a thirteen-year boy named Mohammed, who escaped from Kobani in northern Syria, directly south of the border with Turkey – a city that experienced a significant siege by ISIL forces in January 2015.

Since he is deaf and mute, Mohammad can use only his body, and no words, to articulate his traumatic experiences. He does so with animated energy and no overt sense of sadness. While we may not doubt the authenticity of the narratives that Mohammed so hauntingly conveys, his inability to express them on our usual terms points to the way in which the experiences of others can become sites of uncertainty, projections, misconceptions and fears. The work shows the impossibility of representing war and conflict, trauma and pain to those for whom these experiences are foreign, and how viewers must construct, imagine and visualise such experiences from their own subjective position. Seen in this light, the work’s title perhaps refers to the space of the imagination, and its importance in representing the inexpressible.