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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".