World Art Dubai, 2018

Besher Koushaji

He began his artistic life depicting buildings, using his technique to paint the familiar houses and streets. But after he moved from his home country five years ago, the subject of his work began to change to embody the reflections of his memories and reality on houses, figures and faces in his life. 

Many of the buildings he once depicted are now destroyed. He tries to recollect images from his memories, which then appear ambiguous and unsettling on his paintings. People appear as silhouettes of faces and bodies, broken into abstract, colours and shapes, reminiscent of something seen through refracting lenses. 

These are not just distortions: he uses a technique made of complex patterns that refracts the figures: calligraphy, the silhouettes of buildings and places, shadows of somewhere else. The layers reflect the complexity that distances the artist from a home that becomes further away as the years pass. When he creates his pieces, Koushaji begins by drawing a realistic figure and altering the image by adding lines and shapes. “My memories are fading away, they’re not as clear as before,” he says, “It affects the painting as I try to reconstruct the image again.”Koushaji’s pieces are unsettling, painful meditations on loss and longing, a clear
effort to bridge a distance that’s increasingly difficult to span. They are reflections of things lost or far away; not precise depictions of reachable world, but mirrors that show how it is separated from the artist by time, space and history.

Zaid Shawwa

My Art mainly revolves around expressing human feelings and emotions from a figurative approach, where imagery in my work has developed with time to become more minimalist in composition, but more complex and intense in the way it interacts and expresses.
In my work, I focus more on human actions, associations in life, nostalgic memories and relationships with the surroundings, in an attempt to address people's life, and relate to it, and create a journey of thought and feelings that could live with time.
In this collection I try to capture this unique relationship between man and string. I portray moments in our lives being lived as a musical composition, where people and figures become instruments, and life becomes the stage.

Alaa Baghdadi

 “Loumpa” is an imaginative human like figure that was developed through experimenting with various geometric shapes mainly circles and lines that are created in spontaneous movements of the brush as it meets the canvas.

 My art reflects an expression of how I would want the world to be, an imaginary world I live in, when at times I want to escape the harsh realities of the world around me.

 The Loumpa series reflect hope, peace, unity, freedom and serenity. I aim to reflect a feeling by focusing on my character’s facial expressions in my paintings rather than portraying a certain story, for the best feelings are those that have no words to describe them.