At Art Represent, our recent exhibition of prints by displaced Syrian artist Imranovi underlined the brutal cost of conflict on Syria’s people, and the role that art can play as a form of activism. Whilst Imranovi’s works focus on the role of the Assad regime as the driving force for what has since unfolded in his homeland, the Institute for Digital Archaeology’s project instead sends a powerful message to those attempting to fill the power vacuum in Syria: that their attempts to erase both history and cultural memory will not succeed.
The exponential growth of new forms of media in the early years of the 21st Century has perhaps defined our generation like nothing else, and in the context of the contemporary art world, the likes of Instagram and Facebook are becoming increasingly valuable tools for identifying emerging talent. Given the worldwide use of the internet, it could also be argued that the art world has undergone something of a democratization process in recent times, whereby non-Western artists, traditionally marginalised by the markets and institutions of the West, are able to share and promote their works more successfully than ever before.
