Aysha E Arar

Aysha E Arar (1993) uses painting, language, video and poetry and turns spaces into arenas where she expresses herself. She paints on paper, on canvas and on the wall, moving from narrative to abstract painting, and combines imaginary creatures based on Palestinian legends. Arar covers her personal biography as a woman in a patriarchal society and touches on questions of tradition, freedom of choice and liberation.

“I don’t know how to draw realistic paintings, I draw from the world of imagination and fantasy. This allows me to merge imagination with reality and all the contradictions that I live in content”.
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Aysha E Arar, Hello Butterflies, 2023, exhibition view, Dvir Gallery / Tel Aviv
- Aysha E Arar, Stare well, you think you'll survive?, 2023
Amphibia, 2023

Amphibia is the ability to live and operate in water and on land, an ability which characterizes the Amphibians, mythological creatures, and weapons. Aysha E Arar translates the duality of the biological term into a duality of imagination and reality. The water world is a space of freedom, movement, and creativity that stands in contradiction to the limitations and prohibitions of life on land.

Breathe underwater when you can no longer breathe on land. Like Amphibia: half-human, half-animal creature, Aysha E Arar breathes and lives in worlds to which the oppressive forces who appropriate the lands do not have access. Beyond the staging of a recovery of land or its dignity, it is a question of taking us into another world, over which no colonial or patriarchal force would have taken hold of.

Teaser of the video: here
- The Lying Horse, 2022
  video, 02:02
- The Woman of all woman
  Performance in Dvir Gallery Brussels, February 2023