The Brooklyn Rail

Over a period of days Dr. Omar Kholeif and the artist Vian Sora corresponded via voice notes that they sent back and forth in a call and response manner. Kholeif was in Sharjah then in London then in Sharjah again; Sora was in Dubai then in Louisville, KY. The topics of painting, literature, history—and how they intertwine and influence the choices of an artist arise over and again. The excerpts selected below are from Sora. Kholeif felt that Sora's responses encompassed, in a summative sense, both of their voices.

1
I started thinking about when I met you, because we had this open conversation that I felt like I was waiting for. I'm not trying to be nice. I had this thing in my head where it was as if I had had a conversation with you in a different time, and it was being completed. And when I came back here [to Louisville], and we flew over Baghdad, and it was the first time we were [Sora and her husband] flying over Iraq in eighteen years. It just shook me. And just, you know, being near what's going on war-wise and being in Dubai with all the other side of it—this body of work is a direct response.

2
You said something about being children of war, which is a very much used term, I mean, it’s been used before many times, but it's used, I can't help but, you know, just seeing that child of war in me, but also, I see it in you, even though you're from Egypt. You had many, many wars, personal wars, but also war wars. I mean, we all carry that genetic trauma and, yeah, I this is going to be an ADHD manifestation in how we're going to do this, but I think that's what's beautiful about it.

3
I had all these new paintings in my head about the “red eye.” [in relation to the concept of taking a red eye flight]. I think I'm going to make a painting about taking the red eye, and that feeling you just described of being on a red eye. And you know that Time Zone concept, which is the massive painting that I sent you, because I was thinking about time zones and about how my body is somewhere else. You know? I mean, my body is somewhere but my spirit, my soul, my feelings—not emotions—my feelings are somewhere else. I did this whole series when I came back from Dubai, flying over Iraq, seeing it for the first time from above after eighteen years.

4
As painters, both of us, as painters, I think we're always thinking about mortality and immortality. At least for me, that's what I'm thinking about, because of the obsession with staying alive through it all … But I think we are peaceful warriors. That's what we are, you know.

All I know is I can't stop painting, and it became my life, and it became my career, and I'm always in pursuit of that. And to continue the jobs we hold to buy our toilet paper or whatever we're buying, to live, to exist. It's the only way for us to continue doing what we're doing, which is painting. That's the way, that's the path.

Diving into Ibrahim El-Salahi would be a great way talking about that moment when I saw his work for the first time, and I started having these dreams of these pillars, monumental, with figures and forms. And it made me think of ancient Assyrian guardians and the doors of the palaces, the ones that were destroyed by ISIS and the ones that were not destroyed by ISIS—they're at the British Museum, at the Pergamon, all the Lamassu, all the wings. I can't stop painting Lamassu wings.

5
I'm already on the way to my studio, and I had to stop your first voice note at a very interesting point, thank you for bringing up the question of an artist being self-taught thing. First off, the idea of being self-taught is ridiculous, because, in my case, I wasn't self-taught. I actually was, you know, but again, to your point: artists are great teachers. I learned what I know, and I unlearned many things. My whole life has been a process of learning and unlearning, and it is very rewarding to carry on the path I'm on this way. There are many, many great artists I’ve met throughout my life, including some that that happen to be pioneers in Iraq, like Shakir Hassan Al Said.

Artists must wear many hats, many hats. And like you mentioned, I personally wore many hats. I had to be the breadwinner for my family. I didn't have to be a writer. I was a writer by choice. I never publish anything I write, because I feel the more, I do visual arts, the less I can write, which is normal. I wrote when I felt the necessity to write under Saddam Hussein’s rule, being a female Kurdish painter in Baghdad after my dad was kidnapped by the Iraqi intelligence and was tortured, and later he was released after we were told, told he's, you know, killed, but he's still alive. Thank God. So yeah, I wrote in that period. I joined the AP in 2003 and did three years of journalism because also it was a way for me to get information and to understand my surrounding after the invasion, or liberation.

6
I am cognitive of some things, but sometimes I just let myself go. The first process of the work is intuitive, but also planned, and the control comes later. The controls happen when I start using the solid areas to derive where I want the viewers to focus, or where I like to hide certain things. So that process is kind of happening all at the same time. And I do sometimes think of the works as a body without bones. Or if you imagine if we were just bones and organs and no skin to hold us together, something like that.

I was thinking a lot about the idea of how a society eats itself up. It's it happened in my lifetime, many times and not just in my country. All around the world, it's happening, I end up going back to the Lamassu as a symbol, as a pillar. You know, for me as a child who grew up looking as at the symbol in many places, and then seeing some of the most glorious examples of it in museums around the world. It's like an unbroken idea. And this is why ISIS started with chopping the head of Lamassu, to indicate that it's the end of a certain era or a certain rule or a certain world. And that idea is parallel, for me, to when there is a war or a natural disaster eating something that seems very solid and unbroken. The latest example is the fires in LA, a place I associate with a lot of progress, art, safety, openness, sexual freedom.

It is going back to ideas and themes that I try to tackle with my work, which is life and death, mortality, immortality. I mean, artists are obsessed with the idea of death, and therefore we create the work to resist it.

7
I'm going to answer your question about my process. I mean, it is an accumulative process. It starts with an explosion, like real life. It's an explosive moment. Then the dust settles, then the accumulations of layers and meanings build up, there’s a period of stripping and adding, stripping and adding. And that's how I approach the process and the philosophy behind it. I think of it as an ongoing thing. But of course, all paintings are forced to end in some way.