Homage to Giotto, The Conference of the Birds series

Kassar was born in Lebanon in 1963 and lives and works in Paris. Her family is from Mosul and Mardin (present-day Iraq and Turkey) but fled during the Ottoman massacres of minorities in the late 19th to early 20th century. She is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the Sorbonne, and is part of the Sorbonne Research Centre in plastic arts. In her practice she has developed a rich and varied body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sound, films, writings and installations.

In describing this work, Kassar has said that what appealed to her was the universal message of the Persian poem 'The Conference of the Birds': the idea of quest, transformation and death. Exile is also at the heart of her project on the birds, because for them ‘it was the right time to leave, in the search for something else.’ This echoes her own situation, having left Lebanon to live in France. By entitling these drawings Homage to Giotto, she is in addition evoking paintings of the suffering of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata by the Italian artist Giotto (died 1337).