— Aysha E Arar

"I don’t know how to draw realistic paintings, I draw from the world of imagination and fantasy. This allows me to merge imagination with reality and all the contradictions that I live in."

Arar belongs to a generation of artists whose practices move fluidly between political awareness and poetic abstraction.

Her works are held in major collections including:

Born in 1993 in Jaljulia, Aysha E Arar lives and works in Jaljulia.

Her work has been presented internationally at leading institutions and galleries, including:

Arar’s paintings resist realism. Figures dissolve, environments shift, and narrative logic gives way to emotional truth.

Her compositions are theatrical and dreamlike — charged with tension between softness and rupture, intimacy and displacement.

Imagination, in her practice, is not escape. It is a structure — a space where identity can be questioned, reconstructed, and protected.

Working across painting, video, performance, and poetry, Arar moves between narrative figuration and abstraction. Her practice combines imaginary creatures rooted in Palestinian legends with deeply autobiographical reflection.

At the center of her work lies identity — personal, cultural, and political. Through image and voice, she practices an art of resistance, exploring freedom and its meaning within layered realities.

Her work merges fantasy and lived experience, constructing emotionally charged spaces where contradiction becomes structure and vulnerability becomes strength.

Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Frac Corsica

Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne (Château de Rochechouart)

Fondation Lafayette Collection

SMAK — Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst

Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne (Château de Rochechouart)

Dvir Gallery

Dvir Gallery

Dvir Gallery

Sans titre

Fondazione Made in Cloister (group show,2026)

La Ferme Du Buisson
(Solo, 2026)

Beaux-Arts de Paris

Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Albertinum Museum

Kunsthaus Baselland

MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain

Cultuurcentrum Strombeek Grimbergen
(Solo, 2025)

A focused selection of works exploring fragility, memory, and identity through intimate gestures and layered visual language.

Acquired: Art Basel Paris, 2024 (via Dvir Gallery)

Warm Hand marks Aysha E Arar’s entry into the CityX constellation of Fragile Art.

The work embodies her signature tension between tenderness and rupture. A hand — both protective and uncertain — becomes a metaphor for presence, memory, and inherited history.

The gesture is intimate yet unresolved, suspended between comfort and fragility.

Oil, nitro paint and acrylic on fiberboard, 70×50 cm

Rather than functioning as a retrospective, the publication serves as a framework for interpretation — situating Arar’s work within contemporary debates on identity, hybridity, spirituality, and cultural resistance.

The bilingual (French/English) volume — with poems presented in Arabic, French, and English — critically and poetically documents the evolution of her work across three years.

The monograph will be internationally distributed and officially released in June-July 2026. A preview presentation will take place during the Venice Biennale 2026.

Aysha E Arar’s evolving practice will be documented in a forthcoming monograph, co-published by Dvir Gallery x Sans Titre x Mousse Publishing, with CityX Foundation as Publishing Partner, and with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) and CC Strombeek.

Rather than functioning as a retrospective, the publication serves a framework for interpretation — situating Arar’s work within contemporary debates on identity, hybridity, spirituality, and cultural resistance.
The trilingual volume (English, Arabic, and French) critically and poetically documents her artistic evolution across her entire practice, encompassing paintings and drawings, as well as her video and performance works.

The monograph will be internationally distributed and officially released in June-July 2026, with a preview presentation scheduled during the Venice Biennale 2026.

Selected exhibitions trace the artist’s evolving dialogue between imagination, identity, and lived experience.

Albertinum Museum, Dresden
Glocal Emotions — Dresden

Fenêtre du Studio, Dvir Gallery, Paris
The Middlegate Project, Belgium

Être Méditerranée — MO.CO., Montpellier
In Between — Kunsthaus Baselland
Of Doubts and Dreams — Cooper Cole, Toronto

Dispatches, Sans titre, Paris (FR)
Temporary Disappearance, Dvir Gallery, Paris

Chère Melpomène — Beaux-Arts de Paris

Pulso a Gravidade — Mercosur Biennale
(Collateral Event), Porto Alegre

L'âge du trait Sans titre, Paris
Bluebird, Dvir Gallery Paris

Fondazione Made in Cloister, Naples, Italy

Hello Butterflies — Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv
Amphibia — Beit Hagefen Art Gallery, Haifa
Barbarian — Dvir Gallery, Brussels

There Was Love, There Was Death and There Was You — Dvir Gallery, Paris

Dear Red Bird, Look at Me in Your Eyes — Gallery Sans-titre, Paris

The Arabian Mermaid Will Never Stop Singing — ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul

Al Farisa — CC Strombeek, Belgium

The Princess from the Land of Olive Trees — Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, France

Al Farisa, La Ferme du Buisson
Solo show, Sans titre, Paris