To Be Shocked Enough To Care
On the art and substance of Ugur Gallenkus
I sometimes feel that the biggest malaise we as a society face is – we are just not shocked enough. The world’s inequities float around us and we just let them pass. Our logic - it’s somebody else’s problem, it is happening to someone else: we are safe in our cocoons, nothing will happen to us.
Ugur Gallenkuş decided to do something.
Uğur is an Istanbul-based artist who commenced making digital photomontages. What he did was to juxtapose our safety, our comfort, our cocoons, with the terror, violence, trauma, and hardship experienced by victims of poverty, war, and displacement.
“The solution to a crisis can be described by many complicated words, but you don’t need to know a language to read and understand a work of art. Art is the master of all languages,” says Uğur.
He wants to shake the world of the privileged out of their complacency, but also to remind those who are taken for granted time and again that they deserve everything which is better - better government, better education, the right to thrive, to find fulfilment.
“I aim to create awareness and inspire action to remember and to ask ourselves every day what we have done to safeguard children’s rights, both near home and across the globe,” says Ugur.
Ugur is a management graduate who was leading an ordinary life, till tragedy struck in Syria. He was restless in his need to do something, to make a difference, to put his voice to the myriad feelings coursing through him. He knew nothing about digital art, but he started learning about design programs from online sources. A white-collar worker by day, he turned into a self-taught digital artist by night.
He started publishing his powerful photo-collages. His Instagram account slowly became a worldwide phenomenon. Last year he took out his first book, Parallel Universes of Children, in which he brings together fifty of his heartrending mash-up portraits, integrating facts of children’s lived realities around the world.
I give below a sampling of his art, culled from his Instagram account.
Be changed.
You can see more of Ugur’s work here.
Hear this plaintive voice. A poem for our times.
Wow, this is very powerful work.
I wish we all just needed to be less schocked to care.
And to make it easier to stop so much of these shocking things from happening.
Unfortunately, I can only start small. And share this post.
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