Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores how contemporary Syrian artists use quiet symbolism and conceptual installation to subvert dominant narratives of violence, exile, and suffering. Focusing on the work of Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based Kurdish-Syrian artist Xece/Khadija Baker (b. 1973, Amuda, Syria) and Damascus-born multimedia artist Buthayna Ali (1974–2024, Damascus, Syria), I examine how their material and spatial practices engage with memory, suppressed histories, and the meanings of homeland. Rather than depicting overt scenes of war or trauma, their installations speak in codes—through objects like swing sets, webs, and dark liquid matter—to resist both authoritarian silencing and the spectacle of suffering often expected of diasporic art. Engaging decolonial and postcolonial theory, this study considers how such strategies may open up alternative affective and political responses from audiences, challenging assumptions about how Syrian art communicates crisis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".