Since the beginning of her career, Carole Alfarah (Damascus, 1981) has used her camera to help people and groups that have been silenced, giving them some sort of voice and acknowledgment through images. When the conflict broke out in Syria, she kept her lens focused on civil society, consciously fleeing from iconography, archetypes and the canonical objectivity of the war reporter. 

This exhibition, Wa Habibi (Oh, My Love), organized by Casa Árabe and curated by María Santoyo, presents a selection of images taken from 2012 through 2015, during a series of a trips to the country which the photographer was forced to leave behind.  None of them shows the different factions, weapons, violence or exile. Nor do they attempt to clarify the causes of the conflict or take a political stance. With an extraordinary sensitivity and deep respect towards those around her, Alfarah simply shows to what degree the human condition is upset by war. Carole Alfarah has been a witness to the breakdown of a land she loves, one which she can hardly recognize anymore. Her photographs convey a reality at once familiar yet impossible to come to terms with: we could be them. This could happen to us. It could be here.