Regarding the Pain of Others

During the early years of the Syrian revolution, a na’ash—a wooden bier used to carry the dead from a mosque to a cemetery—was moved clandestinely out of Da’al in southern Syria. A local sheikh and a network of others enabled its circuitous passage through Jordan. It was then dismantled for shipment and sent to the artist’s studio in Germany. According to those who entrusted it to him, the bier had carried 135 bodies to burial.

Using only its original wood and rusted nails, Barakeh reconfigured the bier as a fallen throne. The transformation brings two structures of power and passage into collision: the bier bears the dead horizontally through a collective ritual of mourning, while the throne elevates a single living body as an emblem of authority. Recasting one as the other does not redeem the violence the object has witnessed. Instead, it redirects the symbol of power towards the community that carried and mourned its dead.Surplus planks, nails, and sawdust remain arranged around the chair. These remnants interrupt any impression of seamless renewal: the work preserves the material record of cutting, removal, and loss.

The title invokes Susan Sontag’s examination of how distant suffering is represented and consumed. Rather than showing the bodies, Barakeh places before the viewer the object that bore their weight. The na’ash becomes a material witness—not an illustration of death, but a surface upon which use, mourning, risk, and displacement have accumulated.

At their own initiative, the people who enabled the bier’s passage recorded themselves beside it, at the mosque and in the graveyard—the two sites marking a body’s final journey—reciting poems they had written. These recordings also became part of the work.