Khaled Dawa

Khaled Dawa is a Syrian artist who was born in 1985 in Masyaf and studied at the School of Fine Arts in Damascus, specialising in Sculpture. He graduated in 2007. 

The Syria Revolution was a key event in Dawa’s life. He participated in the uprisings and was injured when the area in which he lived and worked was bombed. Arrested and imprisoned, having refused military service, he fled to Lebanon in 2013 and on to France the following year, where he was granted asylum as a political refugee. Today he lives and works in Marseille.

The trauma Dawa experienced and witnessed in his country of birth remain key sources of inspiration for Dawa in his work, with topics such as war, incarceration and exile among those he chooses to explore in his sculptures, which are made from both clay and bronze. Conflicts and contrasts, ranging from passive versus active to fragility versus strength, and the paradoxes that these produce, lie at the heart of his work. In evidence, his pieces display dynamism and energy, even without movement.

The stark reality of life behind bars for Syrians is the theme in Dawa’s standout series ‘Compressed’ (2015), in which he relays the suffocating sense of confinement endured and lack of space experienced through figures either huddled together or boxed in. Writing for the series, Dawa commented: “In this square, I no longer have any contours of my own. The bodies of the others are mine… a hand moves, perhaps it’s mine, perhaps it’s his or hers, perhaps it’s ours…”


Dawa’s sculptures were also displayed in a major travelling exhibition, titled ‘Behind the Lines: Contemporary Art from Syria’ (2016-2019), which featured around 100 paintings, photos, video and sculptures by 20 contemporary Syrian artists. Curated by Paul Crawford and Humam Alsalim, the show was a partnership between the Penticton Art Gallery in Canada and the Cyrrus Gallery, Damascus. Here, Dawa once again brought his own experiences to the fore by creating sculptures that had seemingly been damaged or corroded over time. 

Recently, Dawa’s work has also featured in key exhibitions in France, namely: ‘Bronze: Think, Move, Sleep’, Galerie Géraldine Banier, Paris (2023); ‘Tyrant Figures, 18 Bronze Sculptures’, Galerie Claude Lemand, Paris (2023); and ‘Trone(s)’, Galerie Géraldine Banier, Paris (2022).