PRESENTATION: Vian Sora-House of Pearls

Vian Sora’s intensely autobiographical paintings are filled with emotional complexity and tension, bustling with a dynamic energy and struggle that reflect the artist’s personal journey to move beyond the collective trauma of violence and destruction that she experienced first-hand during decades of conflicts in Iraq. Sora’s painting process reflects this search for harmony and transcendence. While her canvases begin in a chaotic swirl, Sora wrests control creating specific forms and balance from the visual confusion.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Third Line Gallery Archive

 Though Vian Sora’s paintings are largely abstract, upon closer inspection, they reveal half-hidden figures and suggest landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, cycles of life and death, yet infused with hope. Sora uses painting to directly confront the pain of her past and reimagines the cultural richness of her ancient homeland on canvas. Vian Sora in her solo exhibition :House of Pearls: presents new paintings and works on paper that explore pearls as a metaphor for achieving stability and the needed structural integrity for life itself to regenerate. In this new body of work, Sora – an Iraqi-born artist who sought refuge in Dubai following the US invasion of Iraq – explores the fundamental elements of caustic cycles:  the solid and fluid violent states intrinsic to nature from which pearls grow, and examines connectivity as an essential element to humanity’s collective consciousness. Drawing on her experiences as a war survivor and immigrant, Sora reflects on the uncertainty and shifting boundaries of existence, capturing the physical, mental, and emotional toll experienced across nations, cultures, and time. Her paintings reveal the complex nature of identity and seek cohesion like the iridescent layers of a natural pearl. Sora’s technique begins with canvases laid flat, mirroring the landscapes she has traversed, before transitioning them upright to assert control. Starting with a minimal palette of three colors, she gradually introduces up to 20 hues through meticulous layering, with each piece featuring up to 50 layers of colors and texture. This process balances spontaneity with precision, capturing the tension between disorder and control in her work. Through this layered process, Sora depicts imagined landscapes and ocean scenes marked with distorted Arabic calligraphy and vivid colors, evoking a pearl-like luminosity. Her work captures the vulnerability and courage of displaced individuals, portraying personal and collective traumas and ongoing struggles. By using multiple layers of paint, Sora captures explosive intensity and deep psychological states. Her abstract figures emerge from chaos, revealing inherent beauty/ The gesture of using place as the focal point in her work is born from the artist’s own story which started in Iraq forty-eight years ago. Life showed Sora its unrestful side early on under the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, drifting her to Istanbul at age twenty-nine. She had to leave her family behind but landing on the culturally bubbling crossroad of East and West yielded its magic, too. Migration and settling, as well as adaptation and estrangement, were the realities she was surrounded by in Istanbul in the mid-2000s. Today, the many faces of life explode and recede in her scorching reds, churning coppers, and turbulent blues on canvas. “The atmospheric landscapes I paint today come from a collective consciousness, from everything happening in one time”. Utilizing a synthesis of styles and iconography taken from both her native, modern and ancient Iraq and adopted cultures, along with a variety of techniques, Vian Sora’s mixed media paintings embody imagery that suggests the struggle of the individual in the face of personal and social upheaval, often employing androgynous figures that transmute into expressionist abstraction.  Her work also takes inspiration from such disparate modern masters as Chaïm Soutine, Willem de Kooning, and Gerhard Richter. Sora’s paintings reflect the zeitgeist of the city while also expanding her vibrantly expressive color palette and distinctive visual language. Having personally experienced several wars while living in Iraq, Sora’s search for beauty is translated in her compositions through a conscious embrace of decay, resulting in bright, metaphorical landscapes that simultaneously signify both the tensions and dynamics of change. Dense with ideas, the distillation of experiences, and the transmission of emotion, her atmospheric surfaces, layered with optical ambiguities that create illusions of light and movement, of time and space, allow her to express untold emotional geographies.

Photo: Vian Sora, Untitled IV, 2024, Acrylic, pigments and ink on arches paper, 57 x 77 cm, © Vian Sora, Courtesy the artist and The Third Line Gallery

Info: The Third Line Gallery, Al Quoz 3, Dubai, UAE, Duration: 31/10-5/12/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://thethirdline.com/