Postcard from Syria: Art is Peace

An exhibition showcasing the many ways in which artists preserve their spirits and their surroundings amidst the destruction in Syria

20 November 2015 – 31 January 2016
Sana Gallery
63 Spottiswoode Park Road, Singapore 088651

Issa Touma, Memories of Dead Cities / Syria, 2013.Courtesy of the artist.

Syrian photographer Issa Touma, Singapore’s Sana Gallery, and the Foundation for Art and Psychoanalysis present Postcard from Syria: Art is Peace, an exhibition dedicated to providing a glimpse into Syria’s rich cultural life and its resistance to the destruction of the civil war.

The exhibition comes in a time in which the preservation of memory and the key role artists play in this process are urgent and crucial. Aleppo is the largest city in Syria and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, humanity has witnessed the progressive destruction of one of the world’s most important heritage sites. The artists featured in Postcard from Syria: Art is Peace negotiate with this loss, attempting to preserve their history as well as expressing their personal experiences of the conflict and, through the creative act, communicating messages of hope and resilience.

Works by major Syrian artists are featured in the exhibition. Hagop Jamkochian’s gestural and expressive employment of colour render private, unconscious states of the human psyche, while Thaer Hizzi’s portraits map out the memory of faces long gone. Yacob Ibrahim's large, monochrome canvases infuse the Last Supper, a cornerstone of culture and art history, with a unique brushwork and surprisingly simplified forms, seeing traditional history from a perspective of instability, interpreting it in emotional, painterly terms. Sabhan Adam, through his idiosyncratic and powerful visual renditions, touches upon the deepest layers of the experience of pain and fear. Finally, Issa Touma’s photographs depict contemporary Syrian life directly, without holding anything back, while setting masterful compositions in a single shot.

Yacob lbrahim, Syria ... The Last Supper, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

The show also includes works by the collective Art Camping, which is led by Touma and is intended to be an artistic outlet for local youths. Their work has been particularly impacted by the war. With pen and paper, they copy historical features of Aleppo, which are sadly under the constant shadow of destruction, thereby preserving the city for future generations.

All the works have undergone a long journey from Aleppo to Singapore, via Beirut, poignantly mirroring the history of migration. Some works arrived in Beirut by car, others by bus, others were transported by foot. There, they were gathered slowly, over many months, before being transported to Singapore by plane.

With Postcard from Syria: Art is Peace, Syrian artists are sending an important message to the world. Even in the face of war, destruction, and forced exodus, art resists because artists resist. The show must go on. Because art is peace. Because peace is art.

Sabhan Adam is a celebrated, self-made artist. The sincere source of his works in fragile human states, such as pain and phobia, has allowed Adam to develop a unique visual language. Its Orwellian tones and distortions make the artists stand apart from trends or schools. Adam’s paintings have been shown in galleries and exhibition worldwide.

Thaer Hizzi lives and works in Aleppo, Syria. Following his art studies at the Lebanese University, Hizzi became, in the ‘90s, an active member of the art scene in Syria. His latest works are both an expression of loss and an attempt at recovery. After an unfortunate incident in 2012, when he lost his artist’s studio, as well as paintings and family souvenirs, Hizzi has been painting from memory. He focuses particularly on portraiture, depicting the faces of people and friends as he remembers them.

Yacob Ibrahim is a renowned Syrian artist. A constant explorer of the many possibilities of painting, Ibrahim has used his work to reflect on the traces of mankind. He approaches history both in terms of imagery and imagery production, adopting symbolical figures in his work as well as employing techniques that result from his thorough study of the history of painting. These elements, in Ibrahim’s canvases, combine to convey an urgent and contemporary message. His work has been widely exhibited, both in western and middle-eastern countries.

Hagob Jamkochian lives and works in Aleppo, Syria. His paintings are particularly characterised by an expressive, unique employment of colour and gesture. From 1994 to 2004, Jamkochian taught at the Armenian Art Academy.

Issa Touma is a self-taught photographer and curator based in Aleppo. In 1992 he founded the Black and White Gallery, the first dedicated to photography in the Middle East. Following the closure of the gallery four years later, Touma established the independent organisation Le Pont, which promoted freedom of expression through international events. Shortly after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Le Pont inaugurated Art Camping, an artists’ collective of Syrian refugees and citizen of Aleppo. Touma’s work is held in several international collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum’s in London.