Ali’s Boat

Author Sadik Kwaish Alfraji Studio

Ali’s Boat, 2015, video animation, 6:36 minutes.

artist's statement:

Ali’s Boat
Ali is a young boy who I met in Baghdad for the first time in 2009. He was 8 years of age then, and we only saw each other for a few days in the family house. Ali is my nephew, the youngest.
The morning I left Baghdad, he handed me a closed envelop which he sincerely asked me not to open till I reach my home in the Netherlands.
I promised and kept my promise, as I only opened his nicely decorated envelop when I reached home with my little family. In it he had a letter with the names of my children and his. In the middle a drawing of a little canoe-like boat with only one simple sentence written, saying: “I wish my letter takes me to you.”
One simple, honest sentence and a boat which held his dreams… As if he hoped that these words and that letter if opened in the right place in the right time would perform a kind of magic, his own Abracadabra or Open Sesame, with which he can go far, far away just the way he used to go on this boat in his dreams. His letter in a closed envelop was his attempt to escape reality, with a boat and a few words, to a strange world of fantasy.
He had put his dream on a boat not knowing that his humble boat had carried me to him instead of bringing him to me. He didn’t know that his boat was actually my boat that I used to dream of, a boat that I could take to leave my house, my family and my homeland when I was young, eager to escape the misery and explore the world. And it is now the same boat I dream of to carry me back there as a child, embracing the playgrounds of my childhood which spread between the thresholds of our house up to the vast horizons.
My work is mainly built around that letter, the image of Ali’s boat and my own impressions of that world of childhood where I grew up and where Ali is now.