Casa Árabe contributes to the third “Festival of Engaged Art” in Paris

The title of this edition is “SyRien n’est fait” (If Nothing Is Done), and we contributed with the exhibition “Wa Habibi. Syria 2012-2015” by Syrian photographer Carole Alfarah. 
July 26, 2018

The festival is to be held from August 1 to 15 at Les Grands Voisins in Paris, where artists and role-players from civil society can explore a specific theme: Body and Freedom. Multidisciplinary exhibitions of drawings, sculpture, photography and painting, with visual art, virtual reality, video, film, poetry, dance, concerts, debates, conferences and gourmet cuisine, will all form part of the offerings at this festival created in 2016 and organized by ASML/Syria.

The exhibition, held for the first time at the Casa Árabe headquarters in Madrid in 2016, can later be seen in Cordoba, Barcelona and Seville before making an international layover in Paris.

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 trips to the country which the photographer was forced to leave behind. None of them shows the different factions, weapons, violence or exiles. Nor do they attempt to explain the conflict’s causes or take any political position. With an extraordinary sensitivity and deep respect towards those around her, she 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.

Program for the “Festival d’art Engagé”