Portfolio 

Venice Conversations: place, memorial and memory in Sakar Sleman’s work.

Sakar Sleman (b. 1979, Sulaymaniya) is a painter and installation artist who lives and works in Sulaymaniya. The artist has been commissioned to produce new work for ‘Archaic’, the Iraq Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Her work focuses on political, religious and social issues in Iraqi society and on women in particular. Many of…
Exhibition 

‘Letters from Kathmandu’ a community art project inspired by the ‘Letters from Baghdad’

‘Letters from Kathmandu’ is a community art project inspired by Salam Atta Sabri’s series of drawings, ‘Letters from Baghdad’ (2005 – 2015). The artists Sanjeev and Sunita Maharjan, co-founders of the Drawing Room in Kathmandu, Nepal, held drawing workshops with local schools and community centres across four cities in the Kathmandu Valley. The project was…
Cartoon 

‘Art and War’: April Cartoon

Baghdad-based caricaturist Khudair Alhimyari has drawn a series of cartoons on Art and War, commissioned by the Ruya Foundation. In the below drawing, art overcomes all obstacles, including blast walls and war.
Interview 

Majd Abdel Hamid: ‘Nothing is more present today than violence’

Regional Conversations is a new series of online articles by the Ruya Foundation. Through interviews, studio visits, essays and online galleries, the series addresses issues surrounding art and conflict in the region. Majd Abdelhamid is an insomniac. In the evenings, he trawls through Youtube videos and the news on television, collecting images and videos of…