The 3D printed sculpture shown above is displayed in a plexiglass semicircle during exhibitions.
Sculpture height 24 cm; plexiglass diameter 40 cm

Sharjah Art Foundation Collection

Halil Altindere engages with issues of urban transformation and gender relations, often collaborating with subjects who have experienced these situations. Muhammed Ahmed Faris marched in democratic opposition to the Bashar Al-Assad regime in 2011 and fled to Turkey in 2012 after the Syrian revolution erupted into civil war. Faris, a colonel and military advisor who headed the Syrian Air Force Academy, is the first and only Syrian to have travelled into outer space. Halil Altindere portrays his collaborators in the Soviet Realist oil-and-acrylic portrait Muhammed Ahmed Faris with Friends #2 (2016). They show up again as standing figures in Stamp #2 (2016). The large screen-print on canvas blows up a Russian stamp commemorating the 1987 journey into the cosmos–a joint mission reflecting Syrian-Soviet relations during the Cold War.