Personal Revolutions

When I start working and entering into the realm of the imagination, the world becomes affectionate and filled with angels. It becomes a world without sins and evils.

When I start painting, I become affectionate and transparent. I take from legend, but my imagination liberates me from it and the two of them march together. Imagination does not impose logical or scientific conditions on the shape or movement of the body; imagination is freer, it lies outside the frame of conditions.

The artist Shalabiya Ibrahim uses this ‘dreamy woman’ as a basic element in most of her paintings. Her body appears free, full of life, soaring smoothly in space, surrounded by placid creatures like birds, swans, fish and horses, amongst plants and flowers. It is as if the artist dwells inside a private paradise, the paradise of the East, swaying and dancing to some enchanted melody.

Ibrahim’s work seeks to synthesize the integration between humankind and nature and the characters in her portraits live in a magnificent cosmic dream.

Hala Mahayni draws on her abundant stock of pictures of houses and views of the Damascus countryside, which she had always painted in watercolours alongside her mentor Naseer Shoura, the pioneer of Syrian Impressionism (they also exhibited together in 1978). Mahayni draws, shapes and drafts places based freely on her memory. She loads her paintings with worries and huge sentiments; as if embodying a saying by Al Mutanabbi “Worried as if the wind was below me”. It is as if the wind was blowing the colours on the surface of her portrait at noon, as light has a major presence in her portraits, making reds glow, yellows bright and blues clear as the sky. She rebuilds and reconstitutes her visual stock of forms so that masses and colour spaces appear in equilibrium, flowing over the surface of the canvas in harmony, like an epic musical recital, so much so that we can almost ‘hear’ the sound of their delightful colours.

We seldom find visible lines or details in Mahayni’s
portraits. Her works are based on hidden geometry,
with a balance between shape, space and void. To draw a two-dimensional portrait she draws things not as she sees them, but as she feels them. It looks as if everything in her world is mobile, diverse, and full of contradiction.

The light is inspired by the glowing light coming from
the stained glass windows that she had always contemplated in Damascene houses. She evokes the colours of the flowers of those houses and their gardens, full of plants and citrus trees, allowing us to inhale their smell without seeing them.

By working in oil, she can evoke the harmony between bright translucency and viscosity. She reconstructs buildings, plants and rocks with configurations adjacent to each other, in order to resemble the alignment of the houses at the foot of Mount Qasion.

Nour Asalia

It is attractive to sing the praises of the visual – that is, of the eye – in art. I could evoke the Neolithic statues of ‘Tall Barak’ (Barak Hill, known as ‘Statues of the eyes’) and dating back to the fourth millennium B.C. Or we can also stand before the fantastic composition of the eyes of the monks of the Syrian Kingdom of Mary, as well as those famous stylized eyes associated with the statues of the Pharaohs.

Then there is the ‘Lover’s Eye’ which appeared in the Victorian age in Britain; the glorious eye designed as a pendant worn mostly by women, inlaid in a frame of precious stones.

My sensitivity to the eye was gradually aggravated after my mother’s eyesight started to deteriorate, and she had to endure the pain of injections in the center of the eye.

I used to accompany her during those procedures, which were then followed by a lengthy surgery for my own daughter’s eye. It was suffocating to think that I had personally delivered her to the surgeon to operate on her eye.

During those long hours of surgery, I used to think of a way to endure the piercing instead of her. No doubt, I must have remembered at the time the story of the nun ‘Rafqa’ who decided to undergo a long eye surgery without any anesthetic, based on her belief in the sufferings of Jesus Christ.

One year later, I was able to extract that motherly self-flogging. I printed pictures of my eye on fragile rice paper and sewed stitches on them. This process allowed the experience to metamorphose into an artistic formulation, and gradually the degree of violence applied to the pictures decreased.

I began weaving lines and circles on the eye and around it. For me, today, this repetitive manual work is kind of psychedelic. Thus, I simply named the collection Couture, (sewing).

Nagham Hudaifa’s painting Chemise de Nuit (‘The Nightgown’) has its roots in the memory of a nightgown gifted to her by her grandmother a few months before she travelled to France. 'The Nightgown' becomes a time traveller: through the memory of her grandmother, and the item itself, it becomes a kind of feminine time that travels through past to present. The first of Hudaifa’s paintings to explore this subject goes back to 2012. The dimensions of that painting emulate her own size, the size of the artist’s body, but without a head or face. The Nightgown came to symbolize dual realities: the evocations of daily, intimate family life, as well as a sort of cosmic material reflecting the human condition and all the big questions that go with it. 

This nightgown cannot be seen or observed by or shown except to a very close person. It is an intimate moment that could sometimes be glimpsed, as if through a mirror.

A question arises: What do we hide when we are in the dark? The curves of a body and the folds of desire! What can this picture create in the layers of the painting?


Something as simple as a nightgown can encompass
tangible memories but also symbolize so much more: it can render the invisible, visible.

'My Little Voice Can’t Lie' is a live spoken word performance during which Khadija Baker stands silently and allows people to listen to spoken text through head phones woven into her braided hair. After collecting the stories of displaced women who have experienced loss, the artist wrote a text based on their stories (including her own). As in much of her work, she uses her body – in this case, as the main source of the sound installation.The main objective is to encourage closeness: in order to hear the soundtrack, viewers must come close to Baker and touch her hair. This evokes an intimacy between people, particularly as, in the artist’s cultural background, strangers are normally forbidden from touching a woman’s hair.

Alina Amer’s performance piece, 'Blessing with Infection', is a meditation on the Russian Orthodox Church’s public ritual of blessing weapons of mass destruction. In doing so, it investigates the political situation in Russia and its military involvement in Syria. In the work, this ritual is accompanied with a sound collage of politicians using hygienic and medical jargon in their speeches about war on the Middle East.

The body in this ritual is used as a neutral vessel that absorbs and gets rid of Holy Water to bless a weapon of mass destruction, a ritual in a defence of the claim that artists like Pussy Riot are infecting the soul of the nation with their foreign liberalism.

In this interactive work by Sulafa Hijazi, we are presented with 372 versions of Quick Response (QR) codes. Together, they form a decorative mosaic not dissimilar to those seen in traditional embroidery styles of the Levant – in particular, Palestine.

On one hand, this style of traditional embroidery is loaded with political and historical significance: through its ability to preserve cultural memory and heritage, it has become an act of resistance against occupation. On the other, this particular style of embroidery has become one of the most popular local industries and commercial products; both made and designed by hand or manufactured by digitally-programmed machines.

A digital dress, like a traditional dress, is a variable product. Where physical material can wear out over time, so too digital links might be discontinued due to the disappearance of their pages on the Internet, or a change in their content. Women used to spend months weaving one single dress and embroidering it. During that period of time, they chatted and exchanged stories. With the passing of time, these kinds of gatherings started to vanish because of the accelerating rhythm of life, shortage of time and replacing many handicrafts with technical alternatives.

Within Dress, viewers can scan each of the codes with their smart phone. Each code leads to a different link, such as an article, picture, video or artistic experiments and sketches. These feature digital or key words and symbols, or even personal features. Together, these various links create a mental picture that brings together the many different signifiers represented by traditional Levantine embroidery: women’s collective narratives and their social and regional connotations, as well as QR codes as a global visual language with different modern interpretations. It is within this space that Hijazi seeks to examine the intersection of individual and collective, local and international identities.

The scene: It is the winter of 1989, at Iman Hasbani’s family home in the far south of Syria; a big house with a large garden, there were many olive trees and one big lonely eucalyptus as ancient as Hasbani’s family tree.

That winter, she was 10 years old. The snow fell heavily over her village of Amtan, until everything was covered in white and in total unity with the sky. The silence and whiteness “made me feel like standing in the heavily falling snow to look up at the sky and let the snow fall quietly over me like it was falling over everything else,” says the artist. However, when she told her mother what she wanted to do, the answer was great caution: You cannot do that. If you stand in the snow, something bad will happen to you.

For Hasbani, the horror of that moment, when she was pulled firmly inside after standing barefoot outside the house became a galvanizing moment, terrified by the idea that her body had decided to do what it wanted despite her mother’s warnings.

In the years that preceded her subsequent travel to Europe between 2014 and 2015, now living in a modern flat in a relatively modern building overlooking the road that leads to Damascus airport, she woke up several times to find her body stretched on the floor, in the corridor between bedrooms, without cover. It was as if Hasbani’s body had decided that the house had become a passageway or had shrunk to one space: rectangular, white and cemented but still fragile.

During her time in Berlin, in her dreams she would fly and visit unknown places. Hasbani would return to that garden of her childhood. She still dreams of that first house.

In the artist’s dreams, she is again 10 years of age, amongst those trees, with her grandfather. she remains trapped there amidst many specifics that happened at that time. This is the story of Separation.

The richness of Itab Hreib’s spatial memory is reflected in the surface of her portraits. Her eyes soaked up the beauty of nature in many Syrian towns and villages because of her father’s work, which saw the family move around Syria fairly frequently.

As a result, she discovered the sea, the rivers, the mountains, the planes and the desert. This diversity is also apparent in her colour memory; at times, her portraits are saturated with light and heat, at others, with melancholy and fog. In her paintings, colour flows like water on the surface with an audacity and honesty that is due to the singular rhythm of her quick, light brushstrokes, through which she conveys her true feelings and emotions.

In her portraits, she draws flowers and oases of anemones that look like fancy Euphrates gowns. She is the ‘daughter’ of the Euphrates and had often drawn the houses slumbering on its banks and the boats floating on it between the blue of sky and sea.