Fleeing from Yemen, to Rome. Now his art is all over Italian cities.
When the Yemeni artist Aladin Hussein Al-Baraduni arrived in Italy at Christmas time in 2004, the Arab revolts were still a long way off and Middle Eastern dictatorships were still firmly in power. Al-Baraduni had just turned 27 and was starting to make a name for himself as one of the foremost up-and-coming painters in Yemen.
His works depicted thorny subjects, including street cleaners, religious and ethnic minorities, and dark-skinned men and women, seen by the country’s elite with a detached eye and relegated to the margins of Yemeni society. His sensitivity towards the marginalised helped establish him as a respected artist in a socio-economic context marked by lack of freedom, inequality and imposing societal militarization.
From the very beginning, Al-Baraduni came into conflict with the authoritarian regime of then President-dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was ousted in February of 2012. Any attempts at opposition were repressed through preventive detentions, disappearances and killings. All forms of art, from painting to poetry, were tightly controlled and their messages conservatively censored by Saleh’s demands to promote a positive image of the country.
Al-Baraduni was watched by the police. He’d taken part in demonstrations and been jailed. Yet he continued to paint the ‘outcasts’ to the government’s embarrassment until, he says, “the situation had become unbearable and I realised that I’d have to move out because dying amid the total indifference of governments and peoples leads nowhere”.
In late 2004, the government banned his art, preventing him from continuing his work as an artist. With the help of an Italian embassy official in Sana’a, Aladin acquired a visa for Italy and moved to Rome, a city that he had read and seen plenty about. “I learned about Rome and Italy by reading Moravia and Pasolini and by watching Fellini films”, says the young Yemeni artist. “Today, Rome is no longer the city that Fellini depicted, and the places I fell in love with, like Trastevere, aren’t what they used to be. Money has transformed these places, but Rome is still one of the most beautiful cities in the world”.
His first days in Italy where not easy. He didn’t speak Italian, he didn’t know anybody and he lived as an illegal alien for almost five years before he could legalise his status. “For a while, the Italian authorities wouldn’t grant me political asylum because I didn’t meet requirements. But I had no other option than to stay in Italy illegally”.
In 2010, however, a Yemenite religious leader sentenced Al-Baraduni to death for having claiming he was atheist. This, combined with the request for the return of a cash prize the artist had been granted by the Yemenite government in 2004, persuaded the Italian authorities to grant political asylum.
In Italy, Aladin has carved a niche for himself on the walls of Rome, Turin, Bologna, Naples and many other cities. The subjects of his murals, like the canvases he painted in Yemen, centre on social conflict, such as the right to work and to a home, or the environment, for which he has fought since arriving in the Italian capital.
One of the recurrent themes in his work is a gas mask, worn by both men and animals. “The mask is not only a symbol of social conflict, it also reminds us how humans are destroying the planet and the nature around us”, he explains. According to Al-Baraduni, art should be closer to the people, represent everyday life and its struggles and renounce the exclusivity of galleries: “Art for art’s sake, money and celebrity don’t interest me. I need money too, like everyone, and I sell some of my paintings, but my greatest satisfaction is when I paint something that anyone can discuss and appreciate without having to buy a ticket”.
Fleeing from Yemen, to Rome. Now his art is all over Italian cities.
