Pointed Pens

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/pointed-pens/

PARIS — When it comes to political commentaries about corruption, election fraud, human rights abuses or Islamic fundamentalism, few mediums are more effective than cartoons. Often without language barriers, understood cross-culturally, a cartoon can sum up a political situation in an instant.
“Cartooning for Peace,” an exhibition of recent political cartoons on the state of affairs in Mediterranean countries is showing at the Maison des Métallos, a culture center in Paris in the 11th Arrondissement. The cartoon artists are all members of an association founded in 2006 by the French cartoonist Plantu after a two-day conference at the United Nations that brought together 12 of the world’s best-known political cartoonists to promote tolerance.
“I thought it would be a one-off in New York, but we haven’t stopped exhibiting since,” said Plantu, a cartoonist for the French daily Le Monde.
Plantu said he realized how powerful cartoons could be in a now-famous incident when he met Yasir Arafat in Tunis in 1991 and Arafat penned the Israeli flag on one of Plantu’s drawings, then added a heart to another cartoon of an Israeli soldier facing off with a caricature of himself, two years before the Oslo Accords.
More than 100 cartoonists are now part of Cartooning for Peace, including Jeff Danziger, Oliphant, Patrick Chapatte (who draws for the IHT, among other publications) and Ed Hall.
For the current exhibition, the association invited cartoonists from Mediterranean countries to show their interpretations of postrevolution freedom of expression, feminism, political upheavals and impasses.
Cartoonists from Tunisia, Israel, Algeria and Spain who were present at the opening discussed topics from the importance of political cartoons in the Middle East because of the high illiteracy rate there, to the difficulty of finding right-wing cartoonists, to the novelty of freedom of expression in Tunisia.

© Willis from Tunis

“Humor is a great way to get beyond stupidity,” said Nadia Khiari, known as Willis from Tunis. She began drawing political cartoons with cats as the protagonists — “because they symbolize independence,” she said — in 2011 when Ben Ali “promised us freedom of expression. At first I drew for my family, and all of a sudden I had 900 people following me on Facebook.”
Like many Tunisians since the revolution, Ms. Khiari expresses herself mainly on social media and also publishes her work on Yaka Yaka, a satirical webzine.
“The absurd and the grotesque inspire me. We must show it,” she said.
A cartoon in the exhibit by Z, also a Tunisian, shows a woman in a delivery room with the caption “Imminent birth of the first Arab Democracy.”
The husband asks, “So, doctor, will it be bearded or veiled?”
Miguel Villalba Sánchez, known as ElChicoTriste depicts Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 with black oil spouting from the back of his soldier’s uniform and blood streaming from the front.
The Turkish cartoonist Ramize Erer has been portraying relationships between men and women in Turkish society for the past 30 years, first in Turkey and now from Paris. One of her signature cartoons displayed here shows a naked woman in several panels assiduously shaving under her armpits and plucking hair from her legs before getting into bed with the hairiest of men.

© Dilem

A veritable star at home in Algeria, the cartoon artist Ali Dilem has been sued by the government and threatened by Islamists. In one of his drawings at La Maison des Métallos titled “The Libyans celebrate their liberation,” an Islamist watches the festivities and is asked by his wife standing next to him wearing a niqab if he can describe what he sees to her.
At the back of the exhibition hall a series of interviews with cartoon artists by the documentary filmmaker Vanessa Rousselot are shown on a loop, including a short of Ali Ferzat, Syria’s pre-eminent political cartoonist whose hands were broken by government militia in 2011.

© Kap Work by the Spanish cartoon artist Kap in the exhibition “Cartooning for Peace” at the Maison des Métallos in Paris.

This is serious business, as Kap, a Spanish cartoonist shows in his chilling drawing of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, as a constrictor squeezing his people.
Plantu, whose drawing for the show is a ship in the Mediterranean with two pencils sticking up as smokestacks, said of his association: “We try to invent places where we can have a dialogue, and drawing is the pretext. We want to push past social and political constraints.”