Sara Shamma's 'World Civil War Portraits': Painting a nation's nightmare
Hanging in the private office in Damascus of Asma al-Assad, the wife of the President of Syria, is a portrait of her commissioned in 2011 from one of her country’s leading young painters. “I will never paint a picture like that again,” says the artist, Sara Shamma. “That Syria will never exist again, and I am a different painter now”.
Now, Shamma paints the visceral nightmare of the Middle East that she sees spreading across the world: men and women trapped in graves; faces distorted by laddered stockings as a garrotte hovers; a man suspended hand and foot by chains, like the butchered bull behind; another trapped and taunted by the kidney that is the subject of an enormous illicit and murderous trade; another eating his own foot.
Her exhibition of 15 new paintings opening at Truman’s Brewery in London on Friday is called World Civil War Portraits, though it’s more a collective portrait of a phenomenon that started for her as a local crisis and has grown into a global catastrophe and a fear that dominates her.
In November 2012 Shamma was in her comfortable suburban home in Damascus with her children, waiting for a car to take her to her studio – a 10-minute walk normally, but by then a complicated one-and-a-half hour drive. Just as she leaned forward to kiss her two-year-old son, Amir, a car bomb exploded outside her door, leaving them unharmed but shattering glass and their Syrian lives for ever. As soon as roads were open, she fled with Amir and the baby Amal to Lebanon. She will never return, though her husband, Mounzer Nassa, continues to work in Syria organising UN food aid convoys.
“The human spirit has died in Syria, and it is dying elsewhere now,” she says, turning to the shock of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January. “Those are French citizens doing this, not Arab insurgents,” she says in her uncertain English. “I feel the fear now wherever I go”.
‘Butcher’ (2014) (Sara Shamma)
Source: www.independent.co.uk