Material Resilience

Q0DE aims to curate an annual exhibition bringing together young emerging artists from the Middle East to showcase their talent and consequently, their voices. Q0DE hopes that the exhibition will become a storytelling mechanism where artists can share their reflections with wider audiences.

‘Material Resilience’ is an exploration of how individuals cope with feelings of loss, grief, fear and exile; transitioning and falling through the stages of life. During the transition, the past and the present overlap; the period of creative exploration triggers old memories and imposes questions for the future.

In this year’s iteration of Material Resilience, Q0DE is inviting Syrian artists now based in the UAE, Alaa Sharabi (1988) and Juhayda Bitar (1991) to exhibit their new work jointly for the first time as a married couple in Amman, Jordan.

Both artists will correspond to the theme of ‘Material Resilience’ by bringing their own self-reflections and experiences to the exhibition through the medium of painting and print-making.

Alaa Sharabi graduated with a Masters of Printmaking from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus in 2015. With an experimental period now over, his work favors the large-scale and represents an intersection between two worlds; painting and print-making.

The implementation of print-making techniques directly onto the canvas provides a physical materiality that the artists enjoys. The artist’s tendency to reduce human expressions to their purest forms is depicted through illogical combinations of shapes and forms that reflect chaos. The overlapping of techniques allows the artist to countenance the possibilities of etching and painting, demonstrating a state of confusion as to the future of humanity and civilisations to come.

Juhayda Bitar holds a Masters degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus in 2017. Her spontaneous yet delicate brush strokes translate the experiences and the memories of different times and spaces. Abstraction transforms the artist’s canvas into an emotional outlet, where her colourful palette decodes mixed feelings of nostalgia, hope and a deep-felt connection with nature. The artist’s lyricism conveys her philosophy of achieving self-transcendence through tapping into one’s subconscious and listening to our senses. Her work immerses viewers to locate their feelings and experiences in her canvases.

Both Sharabi and Bitar are united by the different ways they choose to reflect on a lived experience somewhere in-between. That transition bears the potential for them to navigate through the unknown and becomes a playing field for nostalgia, hyper-recollection and speculation that results in an attempt to reconcile with nature and the universe.

Art, therefore, becomes a refuge, a catalyst for hope, and a dialogue between ‘X’ and ‘Y’ who have moved from one country to another, from a singular to a plural state, and from realism to abstraction.