Often as I drive my nice car through some of the poorer streets of a city, I am struck by the contrast between my life and that of people who live miserable, insecure and impoverished lives. I acknowledge that I vastly more privileged and fortunate; having done little to deserve. On the other hand, those living wretched lives have done as little to deserve their misery. Turkish artist Ugur Gallenkus creates just such a contrast between war and peace, fortune and misfortune, beauty and ugliness.
Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. The Netflix film Bird Box featured a dystopian world where everyone blindfolded themselves. The artist draws a parallel between this and captured Vietcong prisoners, eyes & mouth taped shut, awaiting transfer to US POW compound in Vietnam in 1965.
Here the artist puts a happy, ‘normal’ childhood side by side with a Rohingya refugee child: the ravaged face, the overcrowded camps behind barbed wire and terrible living conditions.
On the one hand, are two child labourers eating a meagre meal at a factory in Bangladesh. On the other is an overweight child who presents a very different problem; the problem of plenty.
Where on the one hand are cerulean waters and a child holding up a starfish, on the other is the destruction of ocean habitats and beaches because of oil spills. The image highlights one of the terrible fallouts of rapacious human activity and insatiable greed.
While some people are fortunate to live in regions that are peaceful, productive and secure, others are trapped in warzones where they are more likely to experience bullets than flowers.
One child enjoys playing on a see-saw in what appears to be an open-air gym in a park, indicating a joyful, secure childhood. The other is a Syrian boy sitting on a destroyed tank; a dangerous, uncertain, dystopian childhood.
On the left is a famous photo by Wissam Nassar of a man bathing his children in a tub that is all that remains of a bathroom, while on the right is an intact luxurious bathroom. The images starkly bring home the terrible inequities that exist on earth; with a few living with riches of unimaginable proportions; the multitudes of poor making do with literally anything they can lay their hands on.
While one child sleeps the peaceful sleep that every innocent child deserves, the other child sleeps lifeless in the arms of her father; a little life snuffed out by the brutality of conflict.
The wine represents lives of peace and plenty; the billowing smoke indicates uncertainty and unrest; each day fraught and fearful.
The rocket on the right represents scientific advancement and a future that is bright, prosperous and progressive. The rocket on the right represents the numerous impoverished conflict zones where the future is nothing but uncertainty, hopelessness, the promise of violence and death around any corner.
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