Aysha E Arar at Dvir Gallery

Artist: Aysha E Arar

Exhibition title: Barbarian

Venue: Dvir Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

Date: January 12 – March 18, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Dvir Gallery

Aysha E Arar (1993) uses painting, language, video and poetry and turns spaces into arenas where she expresses herself. She paints on paper, on canvas and on the wall, moving from narrative to abstract painting, and combines imaginary creatures based on Palestinian legends in contrasting colors such as red versus blue and yellow versus black. Arar covers her personal biography as a woman in a patriarchal society and touches on questions of tradition, freedom of choice and liberation.

“I don’t know how to draw realistic paintings, I draw from the world of imagination and fantasy.

This allows me to merge imagination with reality and all the contradictions that I live in content“.

Seven years ago, Aysha E Arar, a wife and mother of two daughters who wears a black hijab that covers her head and neck, jeans and colorful sweaters, was in her third year studying for a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computers, when she decided to give up the honors scholarship, follow her heart and turn to art studies. As the eldest daughter in a low-income family, this step did not go smoothly. “My father really wanted me to study mathematics – it was also his dream, but he had no possibility to study, so he hoped that I would fulfill this dream, which was not mine,” she says. She left everything, did a restart and enrolled in a bachelor’s degree in art.

Even with the expressive outburst in the paintings and drawings, sending her arms to a multitude of styles and expressions, and due to her talent, passion, and insistence on activating the political from the personal – Arar’s art demands observation and attention to a unique voice and action.