On Forgiveness and Path—an Exhibition in Damascus

In Damascus, a group of young artists gathers in an unfinished building to stage Path, a conceptual art exhibition about forgiveness. Curated by the recently reclaimed Madad Art Foundation, the show navigates memory, trauma and justice in post-Assad Syria. Here, art becomes both sanctuary and reckoning.

 

Robert Bociaga

 

DAMASCUS—Somewhere between concrete pillars and skeletal staircases in the unfinished Massar Rose Building in Damascus, Syria, an invisible vibration can be felt. Not a tremor of machinery, but something more intimate — the slow pulse of reflection.

In this half-constructed structure, raw and wind-lashed, 29 Syrian artists have quietly laid out their personal histories. The Path exhibition curated by the Madad Art Foundation, does not offer answers. It doesn’t even ask questions aloud. Instead, it invites you to step inside something unresolved — a landscape of grief and transformation, suspended in wire, thread, sound, and silence.

Forgiveness is the official theme. But it hangs here like the thick dust in the air — present, weighty, but difficult to fully articulate. In a country where self-expression is still cloaked in caution, where the boundaries of acceptability shift like shadows, the idea of forgiveness takes on an entirely different texture. What does it mean to forgive in a place where the past is not past, and speech itself may carry consequences?

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The Space Between

The exhibition’s location is not incidental. The Massar Rose Building, shaped like a Damascene rose, is a metaphor in itself — not for ruin, but for potential. Part of a prestigious architectural project, its construction was halted by the war and never resumed. 

The absence of walls becomes part of the work. Sunlight and wind sweep through the open structure. Rusted rebar juts from concrete beams. And yet, inside this chaos, care has been taken to install fragile works that explore Syria’s most elusive emotional terrain: the desire to let go, to remember, and to move on — but not without looking back.

Visitors step into installations, not around them. The curators resisted the format of the traditional gallery. Instead, they have allowed each work to inhabit its own pocket of space, creating a sense of gentle disorientation. It’s not easy to know where to begin. There is no prescribed order — just as there is no one way to grieve, or to forgive.

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Wire and Wound

The sculpture “Crossing,” by Eyad Dayoub, stretches across a concrete wall like a bloodied net, its hooks and wires twisting into organic, almost intestinal forms. The material, wire mesh dyed in black and red, evokes both entrapment and resilience. Dayoub turned to wire to express the liminal space between attachment and suffocation — to a homeland, to memory, to pain. 

Nearby, “To Memory, Once More” by Lamia Saida presents a series of canvases that resemble flayed skin or raw meat, stained with crimson and ash tones. They hang from thick chains, suspended like offerings or wounds. These abstract forms are neither fully figural nor entirely symbolic. Instead, they suggest trauma as something cellular — not an event, but a condition of being. The final piece in her sequence is a canvas marked only by a single clean line, suggesting a moment of peace, or at least containment.

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In Syria, art has often had to function either as state propaganda or as protest. The Path exhibition attempts a third route: abstraction as a form of freedom.

Uneven Forgiveness

In the inner chamber, Rala Tarabishi’s “Embed” offers a powerful sensory experience. A circular field of over 300 swords made from resin is embedded at varying depths into the ground. Some nearly disappear into the floor, others stand upright — unburied, unresolved. The sound of clashing metal reverberates periodically through the room, timed like memory triggers. The work speaks to the unevenness of healing. Forgiveness, in this context, is not a moral imperative but a personal physics — some burdens sink easily, others resist the earth.

Around the exhibition, one notices recurring motifs: circles, vibrations, suspended weight, and opposing forces. “Elapse” by Judi Chakhachirou situates the viewer in a vibrating ring of sound and movement, at the center of which dangles a wooden tombstone. It conjures the sensation of loss without resolution, death without closure.

Unstable Ground

What’s particularly striking is the frequency with which instability is intentionally built into the installations. In “Accumulation,” Dalaa Jalanbo uses foam, canvas, and candles to explore the tension between peace and the emotional wreckage of relationships. The paintings, marked by heavy layering, suggest the weight of the past pressing onto even the most well-lit present.

In contrast, Anwar Al-Akhdar’s “To Heal” introduces something unexpectedly tender. A transparent sphere holds a fetus sculpture lit by soft light, hovering inside a plexiglass globe. It evokes not only the idea of rebirth, but the need to forgive oneself. Forgiveness, here, is interior — not reconciliation with others, but a coming to terms with one’s own scars.

Freedom in Absence

All of this unfolds in a space where political critique is not explicit, and perhaps cannot be. The curators have emphasized the exhibition avoids direct references to politics, not out of denial, but as a deliberate strategy to protect the autonomy of the artists and allow for layered expression. In Syria, art has often had to function either as state propaganda or as protest. The Path exhibition attempts a third route: abstraction as a form of freedom.

This freedom, however, remains uncertain. Many artists have already left the country. Several works were sent from abroad — France, the Czech Republic, the UAE — by former students of Damascus’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Even those still working locally express their concerns in metaphor, material, or gesture rather than in language. The exhibition includes poetic statements by the artists that toe the line between coded protest and metaphysical rumination. “My country is my favorite wound,” reads one. Another wonders, “Are we really different, or just different faces of the same story?”

These lines resonate more as testimony than slogan — not calls to action, but quiet survivals.

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A Collective Rehearsal for Peace

There is a theatrical quality to how the public interacts with these works. Unlike in Western contemporary spaces where conceptual art is often met with distance or skepticism, here there is a raw openness. Visitors pause, kneel, touch, and often cry. The exhibition becomes not just a site of artistic display, but a temporary zone of emotional permission.

This is no small achievement in a country where feeling has long been a liability. To mourn, to remember, to express grief — these are gestures that for years have been deferred or displaced. Path does not promise catharsis. But it offers an architecture for it.

Rebuilding More Than Walls

The Madad Art Foundation, once a haven for young Syrian artists and founded by the late Dr. Buthayna Ali, became the subject of a dramatic showdown just weeks after the regime’s collapse. Armed men attempted to seize its premises in Damascus — not for art, but as supposed spoils of war. The takeover, swift and undocumented, was halted only after Syria’s creative community erupted in protest online. The outcry forced the new authorities to return the property, reaffirming the fragile but growing power of public cultural resistance in a post-Assad Syria.

Against this volatile backdrop, Madad’s reopening is more than a return — it’s a resurrection. The foundation now stands not just as a venue but as a symbol of what can still be reclaimed. Its latest exhibition, Path, emerges from the very tensions that nearly erased it. Here, forgiveness is more than a theme; it is the context. The show is a quiet act of defiance — a reminder that rebuilding begins not with bricks, but with the right to imagine.

“We Are Still Here”

The exhibition closes with a collective declaration from the Madad Art Foundation, printed in the exhibition booklet: “We are here, we are still here, and we are from here. A path of 29 stories, similar to stories of all Syrians.” In their simplicity, the words resonate with defiance and care. This is not a claim of triumph. It is a whisper of continuity.

In a place where the future remains unknowable and the present is saturated with past wounds, Path does not offer resolution. It offers presence.

And in Syria, where wounds have names and silence has been weaponized, the most radical gesture may be the insistence on remembering — and the demand, at last, for justice.