What Would They Carry

The fear of displacement—of ending up on the wrong side of a border, stripped of everything that made you legible to the world—gets filed away quickly by people who’ve never had to take it seriously. It stays abstract. That’s partly how certain political conversations get to happen at all.

Syrian artist Abdalla Al Omari made it less abstract. He painted Angela Merkel, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin as refugees—exhausted, dispossessed, carrying whatever they could. Removed from their offices and motorcades and translated into the condition they spent so much energy managing from a distance. The paintings don’t sneer. They’re not cartoons. The faces are fully recognizable and the circumstances are fully inhabited, which is what makes them land.

There’s something almost compassionate about the project, and that’s its sharpest edge. Al Omari isn’t mocking these people—he’s imagining them as fully human, which turns out to be the more devastating move. Power renders people abstract in both directions: the refugee becomes a statistic, the leader becomes a symbol. These paintings collapse both at once. Everyone ends up at the border with a bag and a look on their face that history has seen before. Who knows what the future holds. These days, apparently, anything is possible.