“I was and am still in the army camp - for emergency duty call to the reserve forces; since the beginning of April there is no time honestly to do any artwork, so when we returned home for two or three days in the past month I created some artistic calligraphy pieces that hold some wisdoms and values and Quranic verses that carried hope and certainty.

It was a bit challenging because of the critical situation we all are facing and I didn’t have the chance to share this until now. “

Back to Life

اسم العمل الفني..بعد ما أصاب بنتي الكورنا كرهت الحياة وعشت فى حالة من الخوف على أسرتي وعلى من حولي لم شفيت من المرض عادة لي الحياة اولوان الداكن من الأعلى يمثل المرض والخضر والازرق يمثل العودة إلى الحياة

مع تحياتي لك

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“Let the photos speak themselves!”

٤ ماه در خانه قرنطينه هستم و بيرون نرفتم افسردگي گرفتم و خيلي كم ميتوانم نثاشي كنم !😶 ولي به آينده اميدوارم .

"Rise up with the sun, Home, Studio, Home, Studio, Garden, Birds, Butterflies, studio, clap at 7pm, Dream when the moon is up.”

“Sculpture is an artistic practice that basically revolves around the quest for the essence through the removal of the superfluous.

The lockdown has become an effective exercise in transferring this practice onto daily life. Weeks of isolation have enabled me to determine what is essential and what is superfluous. The quarantine has proven that many of the things that we regarded as necessary are not that urgent after all. My hope is that these new insights will motivate us to develop a more thoughtful and conscious way of living.

Being confronted with a humanitarian crisis and the fear surrounding it, also made me reflect on the role of art.

Most artists I know have enjoyed and are enjoying the lockdown because it enables them to fully focus on their practice without the harassment of daily life. Are we that disengaged from society? What is the purpose of our seemingly useless and detached practice? How can art truly bring value to society and not be just a commodity for the elite?

I am currently pondering on these questions in an attempt to rethink my practice.”

“Interestingly, for a lot of artists like myself and my mother Maysaloun Faraj (whose well documented shift in her Home series has seen critical success) the lockdown was a clarifier of sorts. As long as we have access to materials, the creativity can really flow encumbered. I was fortunate enough to experience my lockdown in my Los Angeles studio, where i really pushed my relationship with colour and light within my work. i would think a lot, read a lot and drive to the beach and watch sunsets and allow those surreal hues to filter into my palette. there were limited frequencies in our internal radios: of course there has been a lot of noise, but also a lot of silence, so channeling that was key to productivity. Even now back in my studio here in Paris, I feel a lot of the movement and light within the Los Angeles works seeping in, which makes me excited about what will come out on the other end.”

Ayad has asked me (Suzy) to share my own interpretation of his recent paintings:

"Disintegration of innovation. The multiple layers of our inner world implode in self-isolation. Technological glitches and infinite pixels have become our cropped realities where scrolling feeds is the new strolling from our desk chairs. My night thoughts churn out a scrambled eggs' worth of striking visuals of a time passed stimulating welcomed, but also uninvited emotions that ricochet, incubate and linger into my daydreams. Eight months subsumed within my thoughts, my written and recorded archives narrate an unprecedented moment. Let me condense my ennui, my frustration, the confusion and the mixed messages of this time into these images. Let them vibrate and explode, remaining as a visual archive when the dust settles, revealing the tricks the mind can play on you in quarantine!” — by Suzy Sikorski

“Whenever asked about Beirut, I do not know where to begin. Shall I talk about the curse of its history, wars, geography, and even geology? Shall I go back to the city of Beirut that was buried seven times throughout history under the rubble of earthquakes and later under the ruins of wars? It moved from being known as the "Mother of Laws" to a completely destroyed city by 551 AD’s devastating earthquake. It changed from an age of “intellectual radiance” to a dark era of civil war, and from the "capital of Arab modernity," to a time of Lebanonization.

Beirut is a city of rapid fluctuations. In a span of two generations, it transformed from a pine forest to a concrete jungle, dismembered, full of barriers, and checkpoints, used as tools of control, hegemony, and exclusion...

These spatial fragmentations were added to the temporal amalgam so that the past overlapped with the present and future, as a Lebanese poet once said: "Our aspirations did not follow Beirut’s. While all capitals histories are behind them, Beirut’s history rolls ahead of it." It's an hourglass-like city where the past intertwines with the future, devouring memories in the sands of time and confusing failures with success.

Beirut is a capital built, throughout the ages, around its harbor. Soon after the August 4th, 2020 explosion, which destroyed the city's heart, life returned to normal. The city dusted off its ruins and added a new wound to its shattered body.”

-Quote via Basel Dalloul

“The confinement brought me back to my workshop in my village in Byblos after several years of work in my workshop in Beirut. I went back to the Earth, to the herbs and to the anemones ... To recover my memories, my work and the strip of my life. As if the pandemic carried a message: come back to yourself, to nature and to humility, because your glories, as big as they are, are nothing but delusions.”