When the Dubai-based cousins Hisham and Khaled Samawi opened their first Ayyam Gallery in Damascus in 2006, they were merely dipping their toes into the nascent contemporary art scene in the city. They couldn’t possibly have foreseen how important Ayyam – and Dubai – would become to Syrian artists.
Early last year, Hisham told The National how the crisis in Syria had forced Ayyam to move not just its collection, but the artists themselves, to Dubai, Cairo and Beirut. The Damascus gallery became a studio compound – a safety zone of sorts – for artists in a war zone. It was a dreadful situation, but there has been a quite incredible silver lining.
Because the Syrian artists they could help were now able to work in peace, had available gallery space in which to exhibit and, most importantly of all, a story to tell through their art, the Samawis' popularity rose dramatically. One of their artists, Tammam Azzam, relocated to Dubai and saw his piece Freedom Graffiti – in which he superimposed Klimt's The Kiss onto a bombed-out Damascus building – go viral around the world last year.
And Ayyam's summer exhibition, Syria's Apex Generation, is the high-water mark of this artistic activity. Since early June, the collected works of five Syrian artists have already been on display in Dubai and Beirut, but it's the opening of the London leg of the show, with a new selection of works, that proves just how valuable the Ayyam Gallery network can be to the visibility of Syrian art. Particularly to the one artist in this show who now lives and works in Dubai, Mohannad Orabi.
“The gallery system in Dubai has allowed my work to be seen on a global stage,” he explains. “I’ve been able to connect to a lot of other artists, institutions and artistic networks, and I’ve only been here three months. I feel so excited to be showing my work in London this week, and it’s already led to a solo show in the same city in November. It’ll be really interesting to see how the work is viewed there.”
Not least because, naturally, nearly all contemporary Syrian art is seen through the prism of the ongoing troubles in the country. The two paintings from Orabi's recent It's No Longer About Me series, which go on display in London, can certainly be read in that vein: in one, a figure in an angelic pose stands glassy-eyed in front of a Damascus scene, in the other, a collection of impassive Syrian crash-test dummies await their fate.
“I haven’t always made political art and maybe in the future I can paint about being happy,” says Orabi. “But right now, all my passions are towards Syria simply because I’ve been directly affected by what has happened there. It’s irrelevant to think about anything else – commenting on this terrible situation is what I should be doing. People glance at headlines and don’t take them in. But maybe if they see an image and it really affects them ...”
Orabi tails off.
“Look, I can’t stop the war myself. But maybe if I can help people outside Syria think about it, then maybe one day it will stop.”
If Orabi is emotional, then his work certainly tugs at the heartstrings because of the childlike figures he depicts. Both pieces in London are direct commentaries on the unwitting casualties of war: children. It makes a lot of sense – Orabi has just had a daughter himself.
“The situation was so bad in Syria I couldn’t stay any longer. It was so dangerous. And all I want to do is raise my child in a good, safe environment. My family will join me in Dubai very soon and we have a residence permit, so I am very, very happy.”
• Syria’s Apex Generation is at Ayyam Gallery, London, from today until September 12. It also runs at Ayyam Gallery Dubai until August 28. Visit www.ayyamgallery.com
artslife@thenational.ae
