About Aya Abu Hawash

As a female artist, I live in a country where resilience and resistance are a lifestyle, and at once form a source of inspiration. I belong to both diasporic and conflicted cultures, Palestine and Lebanon, where being vulnerable and intimate can be problematic, and understanding your battles and conflicts can be misleading. This is what continues to inspire me and challenge me. My visual language is triggered by complex historical narratives of political memory and my interest in the long literary and artistic legacy of works on love in Arab culture. This led me to unfold the social reality I live and document the conversations I have censored histories, political memory, and intimacy.

My work is unabashedly personal; it grows from the space between myself and my surroundings. My art questions forms of communication; it is largely connected to the human body, culture, and intimate life.The moments I create in my artworks seek a powerfully emotional response because they speak to our common hopes, desires, tribulations, and even pain.

I use surrealist collages as a tool to compose narratives where colours and layers, and the situated symbology depicted in the landscapes, become a communication system, a system where the audience engagement is based neither on the object, nor on the meaning nor on the idea. It is a message that addresses the wound, the experience, the community, the exile, and the problematic intimacy.Though older works dealing with archives were mainly in black and white, I currently use purple and blue landscapes as a symbol of sexuality and intimacy, as an ideal place, an exiled utopia.