Here we see the idea of suspension and anti-gravity not only in the technique, but also in its content. These floating figures are in a lineage from the Odradek, a creature Kafka describes in a 1914-17 short story called The Cares of a Family Man. The narrator in the story describes the Odradek, as a genderless, abstract creature. It speaks, but abstractly. While not literally the repeating Odradek (which has a star-like, thready shape), these creatures capture the spirit of this genderless, suspended, abstracted creature from Kafka’s world. And indeed the whole sense of the uncanny that Kafka and even Ionesco manage to conjure through their use of creatures and animals.

It is important not to read these as just satirical gestures, as in Western 18th and 19th century works, when a caricaturist would satirize a politician with the head of an animal. The artists are not satirizing the plight of the refugees, but rather problematizing these forms of representation. The refugees are not animals. And it is a bit clumsy to talk about these creatures as zoomorphic amalgams.

Rather they are like composite creatures, made of human and non-human elements. These non-human elements endow them with different powers. Like figures who have the power of wings or of many different heads. This gesture leverages potent characters from Persian and Arabic imagery.

So these creatures float on the air, instead of walking on the ground. Their tendrils convey a different power to them.

We see symmetry, too, in the detail of the head with the towel that is then inverted and repeated, echoing, as we will see in a later work, the notion of endless repetition, symmetry, and balance in Islamic architecture.