In one of the most stunning military turnarounds imaginable, the five-decade reign of the Assad family in Syria came to an end on Sunday morning as rebels overtook the capital city of Damascus. A 13-year civil war that grew out of the Arab Spring uprisings, in which rebels aimed to depose the Assad regime, drove hundreds of thousands out of the country as refugees; Bashar al-Assad deployed chemical weapons against his own people; countless dissidents and other citizens disappeared into notoriously brutal prisons, sometimes never to be heard from again. The massive exodus resulted in one of the most brutally affecting images of recent times: Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir’s photos of toddler Alan Kurdi drowned and washed up on a beach.
But over two weeks, under the leadership of Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist band once linked to Al Qaeda and often referred to in the West as HTS, toppled the Assad regime and drove Bashar al-Assad to flee to Russia. Vladimir Putin, along with Iran, had long propped up his regime. HTS is classed as a terrorist organization in the U.S., but in public statements, the group and its leader have pledged to steer clear of retribution and offer amnesty to members of Assad’s military forces.
During the five decades of rule by the Assad family, artists and other culturally minded people fled the country, whether to avoid oppression or simply for lack of ability to speak freely in their own country. Many ended up in Lebanon, some in Istanbul. Others fled farther, to a friendly scene in Paris or, more recently, the welcoming environs of Berlin. A few art galleries, like Dubai-based Ayyam Gallery (which also has outposts in London, Jeddah and Beirut), founded in Syria in 2006, represent a number of Syrian artists. Those artists have often been forced to take to coded messages to express themselves on the situation in their home country, especially if they have family there who would be subject to retaliation.
Rashwan Abdelbaki
Artistic Freedom Initiative artist Rashwan Abdelbaki greets a guest at the Queens Museum, December 2018, with a work of his on the wall in the background. Photo Michael Wilson, courtesy Artistic Freedom Initiative.
Syrian artist Rashwan Abdelbaki arrived in the U.S. on a J-1 visa courtesy of the Institute of International Education’s Artist Protection Fund just before Trump took office for his first term. A 2007 graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, he has shown his work at the Queens Museum in New York and George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, among other venues. Fear is a major theme in his work; he often paints figures with one eye open as a metaphor for an inability to sleep in peace. He’s also a scenic artist whose work has appeared on TV shows like American Horror Story and Severance.
“The Assad regime has had a profound impact on all artists in Syria, both directly and indirectly,” he said in an email. “It has created an environment of censorship, fear, and repression, limiting creative freedom and expression. The regime tightly controlled artistic output, promoting state-approved art that aligned with its ideological and political agenda, while stifling anything that challenged or critiqued the government. Personally, under these circumstances, I decided to leave the country since 12 years ago and I didn’t see my family since eight years but soon I will go visit. At the moment, I’m here and I will do anything needed to help my people there, and make their voice heard.”
Rashwan Abdelbaki, Last Supper…First Wall (2017), detail. Courtesy of the Queens Museum.
Abdelbaki stifled his own voice out of fear.
“I have some works that talk about the crimes of the regime and its violent military machine, but frankly I did not dare to publish or display it,” he said. “I had to navigate a fine line between personal expression and the risk of reprisal, because all my family still in Syria. However, I talk about politics, religion, racism, and discrimination in my work. And now after the fallen of Assad regime, there’s no more silence, no more fear.
“It wasn’t possible for many of us to go back even at least to visit under the regime. But now it is possible and there is a desire and longing for that. But now Syrians both inside the country and in the diaspora have a range of expectations for any new government, because of economic crisis, and the need for reconstruction and reform broadly, and hold accountable those involved in the killing of innocents and the torture of prisoners, and the formation of a national unity government that includes all spectrums of the Syrian people.”
To achieve all of this, he said, the U.S. and Europe must first lift existing embargoes and economic sanctions.
“The Syrian people are now so happy and no longer afraid,” he said. “And whatever the form of the next government, if Syrians people find that it does not achieve their aspirations, they will step in and change it.”
Diana al-Hadid
Diana Al-Hadid, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin.
“I’ve been glued to the news,” said the artist on a 9:30 am phone call on Tuesday. “I haven’t gotten off the phone for several hours. I’m pulsing with adrenalin. Ever since Thanksgiving there has been all this speculation about what’s going on.”
Her family left for the simple reason of seeing greater opportunities, emigrating to the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. Despite the beauty of the country and its people, its culture, and its food, she said, she now realizes how prescient her father was to escape the harsh life there. Since earning a BFA at Kent State in 2003 and an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005, she has been included in major exhibitions such as the 2022 Front Triennial, the 2009 Sharjah Biennial, and the 2023-24 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Her works, which span sculpture, wall reliefs, and works on paper, appear in museums internationally including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar.
Diana Al-Hadid, The Long Defeat (2017–23). Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery. © Diana Al-Hadid.
Al-Hadid has visited her native city of Aleppo many times, but has not been back since the onset of the civil war. Jasmine, the national flower of Syria, has often appeared in her work. She has a complicated relationship with nostalgia, based on her particular relationship to her homeland.
She recalls traveling to Syria as a 13-year-old, seeing the face of the president plastered everywhere, and remarking that it was ridiculous. “And my family just shut me down: ‘Quiet!’ I was terrified. I remember the swiftness of the response, for fear. Everywhere, even in your own home, they say ‘the walls have ears.’ There was the fear that you would just be disappeared. That was an open secret. Any suggestion of dissidence, you would disappear and your family would never hear from you. This is why I’m so stuck to the news. Six million refugees are ready to come home.”
“I’ve been just talking to my family and congratulating everyone,” she added. “I don’t know a single Syrian who isn’t just gleefully relieved. Of course there’s concern. But the consensus is there’s nothing that could be worse than what they’ve lived through.”
Shireen Atassi
Shireen Atassi. Photo: Nairy Shahinian.
Founded in 2016 to advance the Syrian artistic scene, Dubai’s Atassi Foundation is a family affair. It first took the form of an art gallery in Homs in 1986 by sisters Mouna and Mayla Atassi, who later set up separate galleries in Damascus and Dubai, sharing some programming. It now has a collection of 20th- and 21st-century works by more than 90 Syrian artists. It hosts exhibitions and artist residencies, collaborates with other nonprofits, lends to exhibitions, and publishes an online journal.
It’s all headed up by Shireen Atassi, the next generation of the family.
“It’s a state of euphoria at the moment,” she said in a video call. “There’s a lot of happiness, this huge thing is off your shoulders, but you cannot not think of the 160,000 people who were detained or killed but you can’t even find their bodies. How evil can you get? There’s a lot to process.”
“Syria: Into the Light” at Concrete, Al Serkal Avenue, Dubai, UAE. Photo: Nairy Shahinian.
In terms of any kind of art ecosystem in Syria, she said, it’s “broken. There are no modern art museums, there are no good publications, even collectors are few and far between, because people can hardly make ends meet. The Academy of Fine Arts was set up in 1961 and they still work on the same curriculum. It’s insane.” While she concurs with Barakeh about the relative newness of a Western-style art world in the country, she acknowledges long traditions of architecture, sculpture, textile art, poetry, and other art forms.
Even amid an uncertain moment, she reported that a wide range of people are wasting no time in making plans.
“Lots of friends in civil society, journalism… everyone is going back. Everyone feels there is hope. There are a lot of challenges. But everyone feels the responsibility to rebuild.” That will be a heavy lift, she acknowledged. ”The past 54 years cannot be reversed in a day or two—or a year or two. I truly believe that we have a lot of capabilities, whether in Syria or the people who have left. We just need to understand that each of us has a role to play. This is what we’ve been calling for for 50 years. This is when you roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and get the work done.”
As for her, she’s not opening an Atassi Foundation in Damascus just yet, but brainstorming sessions are underway in terms of possibilities for having a foundation representative there and possibly staging workshops and the like.
“It wasn’t even fathomable” that the regime could fall, and fall so suddenly, she said. “I’m not the only one with these plans now. Everyone is making plans. I had a meeting with the team and I had a slide called ‘Crazy Projects.’ What does hope mean? You’re given the chance to dream of possibilities. None might work, but they are now a possibility.
“I’m drunk with ideas all the time.”
Khaled Barakeh
Khaled Barakeh stands with his work The Shake, 2024. Photo: Simon Mills.
Berlin-based artist Khaled Barakeh fled the country in 2011, after the civil war broke out. He had left to undertake a master’s degree in Denmark, but was back in Syria when conflict broke out. Having participated in protests, he had no choice but to flee. He would later earn a second master’s degree at Frankfurt’s Städelschule, and he has exhibited at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the Shanghai Biennale, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Artspace New Zealand, the Busan Biennale, MKG Hamburg, among many other venues.
The art scene, as Westerners would define the term, is only about a century old in Syria, explained Barakeh. Syrian artists traveled to Egypt, France, Italy, and the Soviet Union to study art and brought their exposure back to their home country, but there were very few galleries and no infrastructure for art criticism to support artists, or the freedom of expression that would allow such criticism in the first place. The Assad family, having no interest in art, did not offer any public funds to support artistic ventures apart from government centers that displayed pro-government art (he pronounced such venues “a disaster”).
Khaled Barakeh, The Untitled Images (2014). Courtesy the artist.
Only with the arrival of social media that allowed Syrian artists exposure to international art scenes did things begin to change. But now, he said, “There is art in Syria today but because of the conditions of war it’s not the highest priority. People are in survival mode.”
Settled in Berlin, Barakeh formed a nonprofit, coculture, to empower artists from the Global South, with a focus on Syrian artists in Europe and what he refers to as the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region, helping them show their work and integrate into new environments, working against notions of them as “exotic relics.” He has also long dreamed of organizing a traveling Syria Biennale of international artists; obstacles like the pandemic and the Israel-Hamas war have formed roadblocks to its actually taking shape, but he maintains hope that it will one day happen.
“I’ll need another 13 years to know how I feel,” he said in a phone interview. “I felt like I woke up from a nightmare, and a very long nightmare, but it happened like a dream, just for a second. We were all taken by surprise that it happened, and how fast, and that there was no fight, no blood.” He is encouraged by the apparent relative liberality of the HTS authorities, citing, for example, that they have left a Christian governor in place in Aleppo. “It’s a very good sign.”
“I think I’m still drunk from the idea,” he said. “It makes me high and makes me live in another reality.”
Anything but the regime is good, he added. “Even if it goes bad, if you live in the same shithole for 55 years, you welcome any change, because hopefully it leads to more change.”
“We had dry roots that were rotten after being uprooted for so long, you feel like the roots are getting old and dry. In one day, it has flourished already, and I’m proud to be Syrian and I’m not a fucking refugee anymore. The refugee thing has a stigma. Now I’m back to being a Syrian artist—or just an artist.”
