Art As Activism
It’s brushes vs. bombs for
Artists Against War
BY Dafna Izenberg
Photography by John Bonnar
In December 1973, when Chrysanthi Michaelides was eight years old, her family fled Cyprus for Canada. She didn’t know that Turkey was about to invade the island, and didn’t understand the move was permanent. “I thought we were going on vacation,” she recalls. But she does remember that there were bullet holes in the windowpanes of her home, and people were fighting in the streets.
There are people fighting in the streets in a painting Michaelides showed recently as part of The Face of War, The Struggle for Peace, an exhibition she helped organize at Toronto City Hall. The painting is by a group of teenagers from Zaire. It is a wood piece, cut in the shape of what could be a bird or a flower. Michaelides says it is a sun shooting flames. Dark green figures stand out on a bright orange background, pointing guns, lying on the ground, holding their arms in the air. Less striking but even more powerful are the yellow faces that float all around the scene, with black dots for eyes. These are the children who watched the war, the artists told Michaelides.
The exhibit was part of Week Without War, a festival planned by Toronto group Artists Against War. AAW formed in March 2003 to protest the American invasion of Iraq, and has organized events such as the One Big No concert in April 2003, which drew 20,000 people. Started by Toronto playwright Shawn Whitney, AAW has a fluid membership that includes artists of all types, from dance to film to comedy. Last year, Michaelides took a handful of AAW musicians to New York, where, together with local artists, they played a Bush Fires concert to coincide with the demonstration against the Republican convention. And last month, the group hosted a performance of Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead to raise money for US war resisters seeking refugee status in Canada.
When Michaelides saw Whitney’s first AAW ad, she called the number listed and got an answering machine. “This is a very important message,” she said. “I have worked in the arts and social justice. I’m an organizer and I want to be part of the core team.” She felt compelled to use her multiple creative energies (she is, among other things, a visual artist, counsellor and professional wrestler) in the name of peace. “Through the arts,” she says, “we can speak peacefully.”
