[aBSENT PRESENCE] BRING ASSAD TO JUSTICE | THE SYRIA CAMPAIGN
absent presence | Bring assad to justice - The syria campaign | december 2025
The anniversary of the fall of the Syrian regime was approaching, and the day brought back a flood of images documenting what happened. Across those recollections, the recurring sight of torn posters and scraped-away portraits of Assad resurfaced with particular force. One image from Homs stood out: a tiled façade from which people had removed the pieces composing his face, leaving behind only a hollow outline. His presence was still legible, yet dismantled, an image simultaneously there and not there. That gesture of partial erasure became the conceptual core of our poster: to acknowledge the imprint he left on public space without granting him the authority of a full face.
The artwork points to the regime’s unraveling and to the collective desire for his disappearance, acts through which people reclaimed their surroundings tile by tile, wall by wall. At the same time, it exposes the extent to which his image had permeated the built environment, colonizing everyday life and asserting dominance over what people saw, inhabited, and moved through. By fragmenting his likeness, the poster foregrounds both the erosion of his power and the quiet, persistent agency of those who refused to accept his omnipresence.
For the families unveiling this work, it becomes a site of reclaiming narrative, a chance to confront an image that once symbolized fear, surveillance, and the weight of absence. For us, it carries the dual responsibility and privilege of standing with them: to reflect their strength, to amplify voices long suppressed, and to contribute to a collective memory authored by survivors and shaped by their endurance.
The design process itself was intentional and layered. We grounded the work in archival research, studying the many ways people physically defaced and dismantled his portraiture. The poster, therefore, operates through removal rather than accumulation, mirroring the gestures through which citizens erased him from their visual field. The act of designing became both empowering and cathartic, transforming a symbol of oppression into a statement of resilience, fragmentation, and reclaimed authorship.
“Absent Presence” stands as a visual testament to memory, erasure, and the ongoing work of reclaiming one’s narrative.
DESIGN TEAM | RANIM HALAKY, KINDA GHANNOUM
Campaign Visual design for The Syria Campaign.
Project Credits |
Design | Ranim Halaky, Kinda Ghannoum
Photos | Homs by Ali Haj Suleiman, Amsterdam by Sally Alassafen & Amer Daboul, Berlin by Rami Ahmad & Maen Bakry, London - Damascus by Hakam Daghestani
Newspaper | Althawra, Damascus - 08.12.2025
December 2025