Liget Galeria, Budapest 11 April – 15 May 2003; Deak Erika Gallery, Budapest 21 April – 29 May 2004

The series of portraits entitled Identity are based on photographs taken at a detention centre for illegal immigrants near Debrecen in November 2002. The artist iski Kocsis Tibor asked children from the camp to pose for photographs that have become known as the ‘portraits of refugee children’. These young models from Afghanistan and Iraq were though strictly-speaking asylum seekers with no legal status, rather than refugees.

The Identity portraits were first exhibited as photographs at Budapest’s Liget Gallery. They resemble blown-up photos for identity documents: the children look forward into the camera and are set against a neutral background. They are wearing worn out charity clothes, which act as the main attribute of their identity as refugees. Underneath the photographs the children’s names appear in Pashto or Arabic script, signalling their individuality and cultural difference.

All the children appear the same size, occupying the same amount of space, despite the fact that their ages range from 6 to 12 years. According to the artist, he chose to make them the same size to emphasise that all children are equal. On the other hand, this slight intervention could be read as the artist’s attempt to control their identity by subordinating their appearance to the structure of his composition.

Iski Kocsis’s social and political sensibility drew him to the subject of Afghan and Iraqi children at a time when America’s War on Terror is raging in their countries of origin. He aimed to counteract the demonising images of Arabs propagated by the Western mass media, as well as highlighting the plight of refugees and prejudices against them. This series of portraits reminds us of the inexorable processes of globalisation, which are experienced differently depending on one’s status and position. As Homi K. Bhabha notes: ‘for the displaced or dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.’

A year later the artist exhibited paintings based on the same original images of refugee children in the show at the Deak Erika Gallery, also entitled Identity. The development of the portraits from photographs to photo-realist paintings has widened the scope of his project in aesthetic terms, as well as changing its political focus.

This second incarnation of Identity followed extensive research into the methods and history of classical portraiture, in what is a new departure for an artist best known for his ecological landscapes and animal paintings. One line of interest was David Hockney’s recent speculation in The Secret Knowledge (2001) that many of the world's most celebrated artists such as da Vinci, Velázquez, and Van Eyck used mirrors and various optical devices, such as the camera obscura, to project images onto their canvasses and then ‘trace’ the scenes. Furthermore, references to Dutch painting appear in this series, for example a close study of Vermeer’s characteristic use of colour is evident in the portrait of Shara. Nonetheless, the artist’s ambiguous approach to the painterly tradition of Western portraiture is visible in the choice of an unconventional subject and its formal treatment.

The paintings take the format of the triptych, with the central panel containing the portrait, while the side panels are left unpainted. This practice of leaving a part of the canvas blank is one of the artist’s characteristic traits. The backgrounds of the portraits are painted in plain, pastel colours creating an effect of flatness and purity that may refer to the traditions of the Eastern canon. Placing the children in front of an empty background can be read in terms of content as an indication of their lack of material possessions, although it is inseparable from the formal qualities of the painting.

The decision to omit the children’s names from the canvases has turned them into symbols of displaced and disposed people. We don’t know what happened to the children since or what constitutes their identity today, the paintings do not carry any documentary associations - they have been raised into the realm of symbolic representation.

Finally, this artistic project certainly tangles with the issue of the Other, which in the Western painterly tradition occupied the territories of the exotic and the marginal. The Other was typically objectified by Romanticism for the pleasure of the bourgeoisie, while the genre of portraiture was reserved for the privileged in order to demonstrate their social and political power. By portraying today’s refugee children iski Kocsis empowers them and confronts us with the issue of the Other in our everyday life.

Analogously, Julia Kristeva insists that an adequate understanding of alterity must imply an understanding of difference as an internal condition. In other words, when we look at these images of Others, whether the photos or the paintings, we also see and experience a part of ourselves.