Hegemonic Visual Culture (Essay Sample)

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Hegemonic Visual Culture
Life in refugee camps is not a rosy affair. It is not full of luxury and fun as compared to average house settings. The living standards are not comfortable. There is limited access to clean water. The level of security is also very wanting. These are conditions that most refuges in refugee camps around the world wake up to face every day including those in Za’atari Refugee Camp in northern Jordan. Za’atari is the world’s second largest refugee camp and is home to more than 100,000 refugees most of whom are Syrians from the Daraa region. As the war in Syria continues, they were involuntarily made to move from their splendid green homes to this void sandy desert wastelands they are forced to deal with harsh sandstorms and tortuous heat of the sun on a daily basis. These harsh setting have hindered school-going children from continuing with their studies. The creativity of such children is stifled and their no outlet for them to express their story and experiences as refuges. This has led some children within the camp to engage in criminal activities such as the ‘wheelbarrow boys’ who smuggle donated commodities from the market to sell them in the refugee camp. Such children need to find an avenue or a channel through which the refugee children could narrate their plight through art. This saw the emergence of an art project that was sponsored by ACTED, UNICEF, ECHO, Mercy Corps and aptART. This essay, therefore, explains how the Za’atari art project embodies counter-hegemonic visuality.
Foster (1987) as cited by Mitchell, 167, explains visuality as the topic that is captured in visual studies. Visual studies associate itself with the study of phenomenological, physiological and cognitive studies of the visual process and the sociological, anthropological and physical components that come into play during seeing (Mitchell 167). Visuality is not concerned with understanding the general appearance of an image, but it is a thought-provoking, paradigm-shifting process that call for one to not only understand what an image is about but also decipher the hidden meaning beneath the surface. Mitchell argues that seeing is conditioned by culture, and one should break from the norms of the society and liberally observe and independently appreciate an image (Mitchell 171).
How then does the Za’atari art project embody and contribute to the tenets of counter-hegemonic culture? The project invokes the children’s cognitive and sensory faculties in a bid to educate them through art. The project uses images of objects that the children are familiar with and come across them in their daily activities but it implores them to observe not in a manner they have used to see them but from a different perspective. For example, the images of wheelbarrow that the children were so enthusiastic to paint. During the painting of the wheelbarrows, the children were made to understand that their efforts to promote trade through smuggling, are the corner blocks of building a new community they envision. The murals they paint, explain that though they have been displaced from their country for a long time, they visualize their dreams of building a new community.
Another important mural the children painted was a river. When asked to draw what they miss most from their home, the children thought of sanitation and h...