Fifteen artists exiled from Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere exhibit in Paris

Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan... Fleeing war or a country where women are deprived of rights, artists have chosen exile to continue creating and trying to repair themselves, the subject of an exhibition which begins Friday in Paris. Called Dislocations, it is held at the Palais de Tokyo until June and presents drawings, installations, videos, paintings, sculptures, photographs and textile or match pieces by around fifteen artists aged between 25 and 55, specifies Daria de Beauvais, curator with Marie-Laure Bernadac.

This exhibition is organized “at the initiative of the Portes Ouvertes sur l’art association which supports artists in exile,” she adds. “Their work reflects fragmented stories crossing displacement, imprisonment, war, but also resilience and repair,” underlines the curator. May Murad, a Palestinian forty-year-old living in Paris, presents a series of painted self-portraits whose decor combines the floor of her childhood home in Gaza, recently destroyed in a bombing, with European furniture. Two of these paintings are like an image and its negative: the ghostly appearance of the artist's silhouette and the multiplication of the same silhouette, covered by an error message superimposed on the image of a tank.

Majd Abdel Hamid, born in Syria in 1988 and who lives in Paris, exhibits tiny pieces of embroidered fabric representing the spaces in which his loved ones feel "safe", made from materials often found in devastated urban areas. Iraqi Ali Arkady, 42, offers photographic images reproduced on broken monoliths. This photojournalist, now based in Paris, documented the final moments of the battle for Mosul against the Islamic State and bore witness to the soldiers' abuses in a multi-award winning documentary, Kissing Death. Rada Akbar, a 42-year-old Afghan living in Paris, exhibits “a superhero dress” paying tribute to Shakila Zareen, a teenager forced into marriage to an older man who shot her in the face, without killing her but disfiguring her. Tirdad Hashemi, born in Tehran in 1991, chose exile between Paris and Berlin “to live freely as a queer person,” explains the artist in a text. His drawings are based on his daily life, with a recurring representation of bodies and plural identities. Finally Sara Kontar, born in 1996 in Libya and who grew up in Syria, which she left due to the war, presents a wall of cyanotype-style photographs retracing her journey to France at the age of 19, with her twin brother.