Anatomy of Fragility
Anatomy of Fragility is installed inside the former Prison Narcotics Control Department in Damascus, a site historically entangled with surveillance and coercion. Barakeh assembles found riot-police equipment into a formation that evokes human presence precisely through its absence. The shields hang at standing height, while the boots remain fixed to the ground, producing a field of hollow bodies that appear to have either evaporated or collapsed in place.
Visitors are required to walk through the arrangement to access the exhibition, navigating the same claustrophobic choreography once imposed by real security forces. This enforced passage turns the viewers’ own bodies into instruments of memory, implicating them in the tension between fear and vacancy, coercion and collapse.
By mobilising the very objects of state control as sculptural readymades, the artwork binds the installation to the material history of Assad’s rule while exposing the precariousness at its core. What remains is a tableau of authority stripped bare: a fragile architecture of intimidation that, in the moment of its disappearance, reveals its essential hollowness.
