BOX OF PAIN | صندوق الألم

"I see a young man, he may be about 18 years old,
he flees from his tormentors, militias, grown men.
They catch up with the fleeing and start beating him up;
initially he trembles under the strokes like a bird.
Soon he no longer trembles. And they continue to strike.
This memory haunts me ever since, like a black hole in my head.
I always wonder what happened to the boy, what happened to his soul."
— Ali Kaaf

Conceived at Kühlhaus during Berlin Art Week 2016, BOX OF PAIN is a site-specific video installation by Syrian artist Ali Kaaf.

Entering the installation, one experiences the physical challenges and entanglements of darkness and light, silence and sound, concrete and void, rhythm and space—all of which characterize Kaaf's work. Vertically projected from above, the video installation is immersed in the inner cube of Kühlhaus: a former industrial building (5,000 m2) built in the 19th century and located in Gleisdreieck, Berlin.

The work does not attempt to document violence per se, nor does it attempt to showcase it in a direct sense. Rather, it bears witness to violence. As the work unfolds, a dialogue of materials occur through the interaction of space, sound, rhythm, and one’s own body. “Poetry is the means by which night can be experienced in the middle of the day,” says Ali. “We visit the night”, he later adds in reference to a line in a poem by Golan Haji. The artistic work itself, which arrives late within its own poetry, understands that ruined cities will not rise up, nor will the battered bodies be pieced together again. 

The work is named after a poem by Paris-based Syrian poet Golan Haji while the music is composed by musician Attila Wiegand.