The satirist

Rania Khallaf , Wednesday 15 Jan 2025

Syrian cartoonist Saad Hajo’s debut exhibition in Egypt at Ubuntu Gallery

Syrian cartoonist Saad Hajo’s debut exhibition in Egypt at Ubuntu Gallery
Syrian cartoonist Saad Hajo’s debut exhibition in Egypt at Ubuntu Gallery

 

Marking the end of 2024 and its catastrophic political climate, Saad Hajo’s exhibition Out of the Box (11 December-4 January) featured over 25 pieces: illustrations, caricatures and installations that invited the viewer to rethink the very meaning of living.

Born to an artists’ family, Hajo graduated from the painting department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus in 1989. Based in Norkopping, Sweden since 2005, he started drawing cartoonish figures when he was 14. As a teenager, he was very good basketball player, but he ultimately chose art for a career. There was little space for cartoons in the Syrian press as he discovered the genre. “Each of the main newspapers had its own established caricaturists,” he told me at the gallery, “such as Aly Farazat and Abdelhady Shama’a, who encouraged and advised me to publish abroad.”

In 1986 he started working with Freedom, a Palestinian magazine published in Lebanon: one notable cartoon featured Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli prime minister at the time, which made the cover. After graduating he was lucky enough to work for one of Beirut’s greatest newspapers, Al Nahar, under the supervision of the late Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury. In 1995, he was offered a job at the equally prominent daily Al-Safir. Hajo remained Al-Safir’s primary cartoonist for the next 20 years.

Hajo is well versed in the history of Egyptian caricature. He owes a lot to leading cartoonists such as Moheieddin Ellabbad and Bahgat Othman, who met and encouraged him. He dedicated more than two decades to social and political caricature in Arab newspapers. He started sarcastically drawing Bashar Al-Assad in 2004, when it was relatively safe for opponents, but he left Syria in 2004 and spent a year in Lebanon before he immigrated to Sweden.

Living outside the conflict zone gave the artist the peace needed for reflection. “As a visual artist residing in Sweden, I now had more luxury to develop my artistic style. I exposed myself to different cultural forms and participated in many cartoon festivals and exhibitions across Europe. My critique became less sour and more to the point. The rise of social media during the last decade gave me the space to show what might not be acceptable in Arab or international newspapers.”

Last year, Hajo gave the same exhibition at the European Caricature Centre in Belgium as a guest artist representing the Middle East. The flavour of European caricature has certainly had its influence on his work. One of his latest projects was titled “Sold: between solidarity and soldiers,” addressing the war in Ukraine: “I don’t believe that the origin of caricature was found in ancient Egyptian scripts or on the walls of ancient temples in Iraq. The art of caricature is certainly linked to the evolution of print houses and newspapers that flourished after the French revolution.” He believes that the art of caricature is thriving in France, Holland and Italy the most, but has lost its edge in Germany and Spain, and all but disappeared in the Scandinavian countries.

Hajo’s caricature was often published without comment, because of severe censorship in his native Syria. However, he would sometimes casually drop a comment or symbol that had special significance in Syria.

“Out of the box” is an expression that emerged in the field of management in the USA in the 1970s, and grew into a metaphor for innovative thinking. The exhibition is a brilliant depiction of free and unique ways of thinking. It invites viewers to think differently and humorously about the basic elements they see every day. “For me, ‘out of the box’ means not just breaking with the norm but rethinking one’s own situation and finding new solutions to one’s problems.”

Generally, Hajo’s satirical art is simple and eloquent. It is universal as it depends on humour, the one thing all humans appreciate and understand. One of the main reasons behind the popularity of Hajo’s art is its dependence on paradox, generating humour and surprise. “I am completely against caricatures that criticise any minorities or the basic rights and development of women in the society,” he said in an indirect reference to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant caricatures published in the last few years in the European media.

Touring the exhibition, it seemed every exhibit is an object out of the box. If the box refers to settled forms, acceptable behaviour and basic standards, the satirist knew how to provide his viewers with a completely new vision out of these forms.

One installation is entitled The Refugee, and it features a small shelf in which a tiny white box with a cover has been placed. When you open the cover you find a drawing of an innocent kid crying for help as he tries to avoid drowning in the deep waters of the sea. The white box evokes both a coffin and a child’s gift box. Another is a box on which a large ostrich has been placed, with its head hidden inside the box, as well as three smaller ostriches hiding their heads in smaller boxes. It is a metaphor for people who will not face the truth or explore reality out of fear.

“As a visual artist,” Hajo tells me, “I was driven by my love for contemporary art and my yearning to surprise myself and the viewer.” To this end, Hajo learned the basics of sculpture and the different types of wood so that he could make his installations perfectly.

One interesting caricature from 2022 features the face of Van Gogh holding a seashell instead of his torn ear; a slightly different version was first published in 1996. In one of his early exhibitions in Beirut, he had Van Gogh himself appear by asking his wife to dress up as the artist: “It was an early desire to express my ideas in different ways.”

Hajo’s art has won many international awards, including the third prize at the ninth round of Caniva Ride in Italy in 2022. It has been featured in books, including Take a Hajo, Take a Break in 2020 and The Country of Violence Is My Country in 2009.

Matches appear twice: a burned matchstick evokes a lonely prisoner in a transparent box, and another black matchstick revolves around a white one. Both are surrounded by a large white space for the viewer to meditate. “In many ways, the match corresponds to the situation of a contemporary human being, burned out by his own weakness but still trying to confront life’s challenges.”

One piece, Albert Einstein’s Tongue, reproduces the famous image of Einstein sticking his tongue out, but confined to a box. “It celebrates the scientist’s willingness to use humour when he was asked by reporters to comment on a scientific issue,” Hajo noted, adding that humour is a core human response.

“However, in a time of social media, when everyone has his own space to share jokes and express themself humorously, cartoonists have become the most serious people,” he laughs.

The artist’s next project will revolve around the dialectic of human bodies. Everyone has his own unique ways of expression, Hajo says, adding that his short stay in Cairo has inspired him with a city collage project dealing with the spirit of the city. “In Cairo, a city characterised by its renewed energy, you are always faced with funny human stories everywhere you go. In addition,” he added, “the coexistence of different architectural styles and the chaos make up a rich and beautiful picture. Sleepless Cairo is like a buzzing business center: when the day shift ends, the night shift takes over.”


* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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