Olivier Kugler

Chore reading, because it's good for you.

An artist interviews lots of Syrian refugees then jumbles their words and his images in two page spreads with word balloons and captions that have to be numbered in order to give you any sort of clue of how to read the mess. And often the words don't even fit inside the balloons and boxes, squirting out or jumping to the other side of the page with asterisks. Attention is drawn to certain details in the art, usually random objects, with arrows and labels.

The art is good, make no mistake, and uses an interesting after-image technique to give a sense of movement, though the coloring is at times as random as the text placement. In making a work of art of his project, though, I feel the creator may have distracted me from the human testimony that should be front and center?… (mere)