Screenprint on Fabriano, 480 x 325mm
That’s the Spirit! is a screenprint on Fabriano depicting the Dead Cities of the Aleppo region in Syria – once-thriving trade centres and vast olive-producing landscapes, now sites of fragility and impending loss. These ancient limestone settlements, already weathered by time, mirror the vulnerability of contemporary Syrian cities under the ongoing civil war. The work considers how histories collapse in cycles, and how cultural heritage becomes collateral damage in modern conflict.
Olives drift across the composition, suspended like falling bombs. Their forms are deliberately ambiguous: at once martini olives, punctured and stuffed with red pimento, but also the stylised RGD-5 grenades – weapons widely circulated in the Syrian war. This visual slippage collapses pleasure and violence into a single object. The olive, traditionally a symbol of peace, trade, and sustenance in the region, mutates into an emblem of destruction. The title, That’s the Spirit!, leans into this tension, invoking alcohol, resilience, and forced optimism in the face of devastation.
Atop one crumbling structure, three small figures sit casually drinking Molotov cocktails. Their gesture borders on absurdity. They embody a dark humour that surfaces in moments of crisis; a coping mechanism that trivialises, distracts, and distances. The scene oscillates between whimsy and catastrophe, which echoes the uneasy way conflict is consumed at a distance.
Through playful visual language and restrained colour, the work confronts the erosion of both ancient and contemporary Syrian landscapes. It asks what remains when culture, industry, and community are reduced to rubble, and whether humour can sustain us.
Laura Krog is a South African artist whose practice constructs symbolic worlds populated by recurring characters – hybrid animals, jesters, knights, and embodied alter-egos – through which she examines power, intimacy, and inherited systems of control. Working through a feminist lens, Krog explores how archetypal roles are performed, resisted, and destabilised within interpersonal and cultural frameworks.
Her practice draws from medieval visual language, while using mediums such as charcoal, collage, and multi-media. Through layered collage and multi-media works, she builds environments where absurdity and satire co-exist with vulnerability. By treating symbolism as a living system rather than fixed allegory, Krog invites viewers to navigate shifting identities, relational tension, and the negotiations embedded within ritual and representation.