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Lebanese lira

Fifteen lira: blood-stained notes launch anti-war art project

Two blood-stained lira notes which crystalize the turmoil of an Iraqi artist’s life have inspired a major anti-war project.

In 1983 Yousif Naser, who was working as a journalist on PLO publications in Beirut, volunteered to help the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. “There were no publications during the war so I volunteered to help in a hospital and was sent to pick up a wounded fighter who was shot in the chest and take him to the hospital,” Naser recalled.

“The hospital was a fabricated building. I had to bring him to the fourth floor with no lift. The man was bigger than me. I was hungry and tired because of the war. There was no food, no nothing. So I carried this person to the hospital with another person. They gave him a bed. You couldn’t call it bed – it was just something to lie on. His chest was filled with shrapnel. Blood was everywhere,” Naser said remembering every detail as if he was describing something that happened yesterday not 37 years ago.

“The man asked me if I smoked. He wanted to smoke a cigarette. The doctor got very angry and said the ‘smoke will come out of your chest. You are full of holes.’ So I denied I was a smoker. The doctor said’ give him a cigarette’ when he started shouting. The man pulled two Lebanese bank notes out of his pocket, one ten and one five lira. They were blood stained because the shrapnel went through them and looked like Arabesque. He asked me to buy him the cigarettes.

“No shopkeeper would accept these notes so I put them in my pocket, bought him the cigarettes with my own money and went to help another wounded person. After the siege of Beirut I left for Syria. I forgot the 15 lira were still in my pocket. They Syrians took all my belongings including a forged passport. I left Syria for Cyprus after three years with the 15 lira.

“In Cyprus I worked as a designer for the PLO for seven years but had to leave in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I hid the 15 lira and left for Norway. When I went from one place to another I left everything behind. All my belongings. I always had to leave my studio and lots of books and drawings. I left everything but his 15 lira stayed with me. I had to leave Norway after a month because they discovered I had a forged passport.

“When I got to England the authorities searched me but they did not find the 15 lira. I was sent to court and ordered to leave but I did not leave for two years and they finally accepted me as a refugee. This 15 lira stayed with me. It was was something which crystalized the turmoil I had been through my whole life.”

Naser settled in Ealing, West London. In 1997 he set up the ARK gallery in a vacant building belonging to West London Churches in South Ealing which provided a platform for innovative artists. In 2004 the council sold the building and provided alternative premises from which the ARK continued it activities until 2014. Sadly this building was also sold and the ARK closed its doors.

Naser found time to complete an MA in post modernism from Middlesex University for which he received a distinction. He continued to produce a variety of art works including his famous Black Rain series of sketches – an initial reaction to the post war trauma in Iraq.

But the memory of how he acquired the 15 lira, which have pride of place in his home where his modest studio is now based, never left him. There is emotion in his voice as he remembers the wounded fighter: “I was in that war that I was painting. Painting at a time like that seemed to me something unrelated to reality, here a real life and death game evolves, the dead man is not a combination of lines and colours that you can master with exercise but a real body, bloody and shattered. The demolished houses are not surfaces of shadows and light, but rather sad ruins that turned painting into something incomprehensible.”

At the beginning of this year Naser decided to use his war experience to launch the FIFTEEN project and invited an international range of artists to create original art works using different mediums around the anti-war theme. He contacted artists from Lebanon, Iraq, Cyprus, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Slovenia and the UK and they started a dialogue about the main themes of the project: How do we deal with the negative legacies of war, how do we remember and build on more useful legacies? How do we explore and express the relationships between war and art in a way that condemns war and glorifies peace? In addition to the artists a film maker, a painter, a sculptor and a musician have agreed to take part.

The project is ambitious. It is hoped the artists will complete their contributions by July 2021 and four exhibitions are planned: two in London and two in Cornwall where workshops will be held at the Carnyorth Environmental Centre. The art works will be displayed on a website for a year and the project process will be filmed and edited into a documentary. A project book will also be produced and sold to the public to help finance the next phrase – a follow-up project which will focus on the building and maintenance of peace.

Yousif Naser

To take part in the project please contact:

Yousif Naser

Email: yousifark@yahoo.co.uk
Mobile: +447943 785223
Website: www.yousifnaser.com