“The most important thing for me is to be honest with
my paintings.”
Mohannad Orabi
As part of
its entry strategy into the Damascus art market in 2007 the Ayyam
Gallery conducted an open call
for emerging Syrian artists to join an in house program that included
representation. From the 150 entries ten were selected and amongst that ten was
the figurative painter Mohannad Orabi.
An alumni of Damascus’ Faculty
of Fine Arts from the class of the year 2000, Orabi was painting stylized characters
that he had determined were self-portraits.
As he told the Canvas
Supplement “Sometimes
she turns out to be feminine, sometimes masculine, sometimes childlike. They
don’t look like me physically, sure, but their mood is mine.”
The birth of his daughter
in 2011 coincided with the start of the Syrian civil war, events that were the
catalyst for a major shift in his painting as well as his life.
As he told Dubai’s English
language newspaper, The
National “It was the year that everything changed. Suddenly
we were surrounded by a lot of violence and blood. We felt sadness, stress,
fear, disappointment and confusion. We were really worried about the future and
no longer felt safe in the present. When I looked at my daughter and heard the
sound of war outside, the characters in my paintings were not my story anymore
but those of the people around me.”
Orabi
moved to Cairo and two years later to Dubai where he has a residence permit. “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.”
Displaced from his homeland, Orabi relies on social
media to keep in contact with family and friends with the images in his work
becoming symbolic of their profile pictures.
As he explains “I began to build up a relationship
between myself and the profile pictures of other people on Facebook. It wasn’t
the real person but their image that showed me how they were feeling.”
A point Orabi elaborates about saying “I
haven’t always made political art and maybe in the future I can paint about
being happy. 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’s
current exhibition Mu'allaqat is on show at the Ayyam Gallery in Beirut until the 16th of July.
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