Despite volatility, Syrian artists are painting brighter futures through the haze

AlBaraa Haddad is describing a recurring nightmare he used to have before the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. He is in his hometown of Latakia, by the Mediterranean sea, and it is under régime control. ​“You immediately realise that there is a checkpoint ahead,” he says. ​“They are coming to you, and now, you are going to hell.”

The photographer and filmmaker is sitting in a café in the old city of Damascus, drinking maté. It is two days before the one year anniversary of the brutal dictator’s overthrow by opposition forces, and the city is buzzing. 12 months ago, he was in Paris on an artist residency when he heard Assad and his family had finally left the country after 53 years in power – the last 14 of which had been spent engulfed in a bloody civil war. ​“It felt like a dream,” the 30-year-old recalls.

Three days after the régime fell, Haddad went back to Syria, crossing the border from Türkiye, where he had fled to in 2015. He had given up all hope of ever returning home. ​“It felt surreal. When I arrived, it was the first time in my whole life that I’d been in Damascus.” It took him at least seven months to feel safe in areas once held by Assad. Growing up in the shadow of the régime, he had witnessed its violence and repression – both his mum and dad had been arrested, and his house stormed. 

He describes how the culture of silence meant he couldn’t speak about it with anyone – not even his friends. ​“Photography became this escape,” he says, after his uncle gifted him an analogue camera and he quickly became obsessed, taking photos of the nature surrounding his home. When the revolution started in 2011, he began to closely follow and document everything: haunting black-and-white images of the bombing, the battles, the devastation, along with the human stories of resistance and displacement. He was just 15 at the time, but felt a responsibility to document; to tell the world what was happening.

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With Syrian artists, like Haddad, returning to their homeland after years of exile, a cultural renaissance is spreading across the country as artists – both returning and those who remained – unite to revive the creative landscape and express themselves in a way they never dreamed of doing under Assad. It comes despite fear and uncertainty still remaining throughout Syria – particularly among minority groups, such as Alawites, Druze, Yazidis, and Kurds – with waves of sectarian violence in the last year and escalating tensions in the northeast. 

Now based in Damascus, Haddad recently co-founded a cultural centre, Dar Ebla, with the aim of empowering Syrians to connect, create, and reflect. With his co-founder, the Syrian writer Jaber Baker, they run workshops around the country, spanning everything from graffiti to cyanotype printing to storytelling, gathering together artists and ordinary Syrians who want to learn new skills. ​“Art is necessary for healing,” he says, adding that it’s a way for people to speak about their experiences and to demand justice. Named after Ebla – a powerful, ancient Syrian kingdom in the eastern countryside of Idlib – the workshops are open to all, with a focus on preserving Syrians’ collective memory and building a cultural identity. He says they have had people from lots of different backgrounds joining. ​“Syria was not an open country [before the fall], so all these spaces were not accessible for everyone, only for people that had some connections,” he says. The art scene in Syria was ​“selective and corrupt – we’re trying to break that”.

This is beginning to change. ​“The level of freedom [now] is unprecedented in Syria,” says Shireen Atassi, director of the Atassi Foundation, a non-profit art initiative dedicated to promoting and preserving Syrian art. ​“People are saying all sorts of things, writing all sorts of things, drawing and painting all sorts of things,” she says. Although the art scene also needs institutions to support artists, which is what is lacking at the moment, she adds. Still: ​“There is a lot of momentum – almost like this desire for everyone to do something, to give back, to play a role, and to have a say.”

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And with this creative freedom, the art Syrians are producing is changing. Mohamed Al Mufti, a painter and architect from Damascus, says that over the last year his work has become ​“happier and less dramatic, even though there are many fears, many concerns, and many challenges”.

Before 2011, the 49-year-old says his artwork was abstract and experimental. When the revolution began, he started documenting what was happening through his oil paintings. They are stark and confronting. In one painting, blue barrel bombs dropped by Assad’s forces fall from the sky onto an already-demolished city – painted from the point of view of the helicopter, it feels as if you are falling down with them. 

Despite the grim subject, Al Mufti says he tries to ​“inject a touch of sarcasm, irony or black humour”. His most recent painting depicts a black-and-white tank with a bright red bra slung over the gun. ​“It’s huge, almost 3 metres long and you have this very sensual and curvy red thing, this lightness shutting up the whole heaviness of this killing machine. So your focus is only on that detail,” he explains. “[There is] something extremely sensual, extremely emotional, and extremely romantic in this country, which I thought I lost completely after missing 14 years of my life outside of Syria.”

Al Mufti was living in Beirut – his home since 2012 – when he heard the news of Assad’s ousting. ​“I wanted to come the same day, the 8^th, but I couldn’t find a taxi from Lebanon,” he says, while smoking a cigarette in Mazbouta café. ​“I did manage to find one for the next day – it took a huge amount of money, but I was ready to pay the price.” While there, he painted a Syrian street scene titled ​‘9^th December’ – look closely and you can see a portrait of Bashar al-Assad that has been thrown in a rubbish bin. He is planning to move back to Damascus soon, and is optimistic about the future, although: ​“We can’t expect that overnight everything will be glorious – Syria is a very old lady, and you need to take care of it. You need to restore it. You need to rehabilitate it.”

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Leading the way is the next generation of artists, pushing the scene into the future by making art that is astounding in its boldness. 18-year-old Syrian-Cuban sculptor, Pedro Naddaf, finds old mortar shells and remnants of war which he transforms from deadly weapons into powerful works of art. I meet him at Damascus National Museum where he has an exhibition; shells that once rained down on people, killing and maiming, are now contorted into beautiful rusted shapes – some abstract, some resembling familiar things, like a bell, a curved spine, even a bench with a person sat on it.

“I lived my childhood in war, so I got used to the sound of bombs,” Naddaf says. His parents used to play a game with him and his older brother, seeing if they could guess what kind of bomb it was from the sound it made. ​“They turned it into something fun.” When he was seven he almost got hit by a mortar shell while walking down a street in the capital, which exploded 3 metres away from him. He’s now got a mortar tail fin inked on his arm. The art he makes is his way of reclaiming the weapons – taking away the fear, in a similar way to what his parents did when they created the guessing game. ​“It is like my healing process – I can make this sad thing into something I love. Now to me, I’m stronger than this weapon, I have turned it into something that is really beautiful,” he says.

He shows me his collection of war remnants at his home in eastern Damascus, opening a big metal box filled with bomb parts and scrap metal. It is a treasure trove of menacing finds – including the nose of a huge cluster bomb. He searches for the fragments when he goes on walks with his dad in areas where there were lots of bombing, like Jobar and Yarmouk in the suburbs, as well as Zabadani, a town in the south. First, he checks to see if they are safe and empty, researching what they are if he is unsure, then he puts them in his backpack and takes them home to start designing the sculptures, before taking them to be welded. He says he is inspired by his dreams and the shapes of destroyed architecture, which he finds beauty in. ​“Sometimes I think it looks like the bombed buildings are hugging each other,” he says. 

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Jobar, a neighbourhood on the edge of Damascus that bears the scars of Assad’s heavy bombardment, was where artist Zainab Al Abrar used to live. Originally from Idlib in the northwest, she grew up in Jobar until one day during the war when she was 10, her mother told her to pack her things; they were leaving. Most days, the family sheltered in the basement. ​“I listened to the mice there,” says the 22-year-old. Those memories and the sounds feature prominently in her art, depicted through swirling oils and yellow acrylic mice scurrying across paper. ​“I feel we’re like mice. They are constantly escaping, running away. They’re terrified of what’s happening,” she says. 

Art is her ​“safe zone” where she can piece together her memories and explore meanings of home and displacement. During the war she went to stay with her grandmother on the other side of the city to escape the fighting. It was only meant to be for a week, but 12 years later and just a few days after Assad’s régime was toppled, she finally returned. ​“It was a shock to see it,” she says. Her house was still standing, but it was an empty shell. The only thing she recognised was the faint outline of a Cinderella poster on her old bedroom wall – the last trace of a childhood snatched away by war. 

Now Assad is gone, she explains that she can speak more freely about what her art represents, as she shows me around her studio at the top of a traditional Damascene building overlooking the rooftops of the city. It is part of Madad Art Foundation, a non-profit which helps emerging Syrian visual artists. Al Abrar hopes that in the future Syrian artists will be ​“given a chance to shine”. 

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Hannah Arafeh, a photographer from Damascus, thinks the art scene in Syria is already flourishing and that is reverberating outside of the country too. ​“I think for the first time in my life, I’m seeing more media coverage in Syria of art and culture, as opposed to war and destruction,” she says. ​“There’s also a real commitment to the community aspect too. Every day I’m a bit more inspired and amazed by what’s happening.”

The 26-year-old’s work portrays the beauty in everyday details of life in Syria – focusing on the humanity of her homeland. Her work is filled with colour and energy; smiling children play in the street, interspersed with bustling markets, skateboarders, and ancient olive groves. Through her work she tries to make sense of her ​“fractured and, at times, painful relationship” with her country, where she can sometimes feel like a ​“familiar stranger” after being away for nine years during the war. 

She hopes her country has a ​“long and prosperous future where everyone has safety, freedom and happiness.” Although, she admits the road ahead is long, requiring ​“intention, thought, care, and inclusion. I hope to be part of that”. 

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These Syrian artists are now the architects of a new reality. In workshops, studios, and on streets once defined by fear, they are actively sculpting a freer, more vibrant nation with community at its heart, while harnessing art’s power to heal.

Jessie Williams is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Instagram.

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