About — Raafat Ballan

In everyday life, we frequently use the term “Contemporary” to describe a person, fashion, art, literature, issues and trends that are happening now and associated with the current time - but does it really make a person contemporary if all they do is accept the current time and trends? The Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben maps the relationship of the term “Contemporary” with current time differently - it is the relationship with current time that adheres to it through disjunction. In order to be contemporary, one needs to detach themselves from the current time, and thus, one is more capable than others to perceive through the absence and darkness of time. Artists often seek out these kinds of disjunctions and perforations in personal, political and social structures by dislocating themselves in time and space. Artists like Raafat Ballan are among those whose identities have been disrupted and displaced as a result of politicalinstability and friction. He was born and studied art in Syria, a nation in which political rivalries within the populace resulted in bloodshed and violence, forcing many people to flee to other nations to live, where they are continually trying to remap their identities with new political and social surroundings. The act of remapping often leads to redefining, relocating and returning to the nostalgia and shared past which is lost but always remains in an individual memory.

Raafat’s life and works are intertwined and constitute a narrative around interactional identities and the remnants of his antecedents’ past and memories. His works can be interpreted through visual, political and psychological lenses. The visual language he uses suggests the existential issues of our time. His recurrent subjects, human figures that are silent, serious and isolated with dark contour lines facing fearlessly toward the viewer, establish a sensory and emotional connection with an alien identity that is deeply hurt and in pain. The placement of those figures on canvas are deliberately arranged in a vacuum of space without a background, highlighting the uncertainty of mapping their identities and searching for lost places and memories in a new location. Those figures once had a continuous identity in the form of amateur photographs of a family which Raafat collected from the streets of Hamburg or from Arabic newspaper clippings or from a literary book. Raafat adopts them as his own and gives monumentality to someone’s else lost memories by transforming them into a personal narrative, which resonates emotionally and enigmatically, and impacts the viewer’s deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

-Centraal Museum/ Permanent collection/ Utrecht 2024

- On this land/ Barjeel ART Foundation/ Alserkal Avenue Dubai UAE 2024

-Het Noordbrabants museum /Imagen Home/ 2024

-Sharjah art Museum/ Parallel Histories/ collection Barjeel ART Foundation/ Sharjah UAE 2023

-We are all streams of the same water/ Galrie SANAA/ Utrecht 2023

-Museum Arnhem/ Between Borders (Tussen Grenzen)/ permanents collection 2023

-Kunst RAI/ Galerie SANAA /Amsterdam 2023

-Turning Notes/ Made Van Krimpen/ Amsterdam2023

-Egypt International Art Fair/2022