About: A talk by Syrian-born Cambridge (UK)-based visual artist Issam Kourbaj on his response to the ongoing Syrian conflict and about the destruction of his homeland and cultural and natural heritage since March 2011. He will also be speaking about his recent two major solo exhibitions in Cambridge, UK: Urgent Archive and You are not you and home is not home at Kettle’s Yard and the Heong Gallery, respectively (March–June 2024). These concurrent and evolving exhibitions reflected on loss, memory and renewal, and included installations, moving images, sculpture, performance and works on paper.
About the speaker: Issam Kourbaj was born in Syria (1963) and trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Damascus, the Repin Institute of Fine Arts and Architecture in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), and Wimbledon School of Art. He has lived in Cambridge, UK, since 1990. He has been artist-in-residence and bye-fellow, and is currently a lector in art, at Christ’s College, Cambridge University. Kourbaj is one of five members of the jury for the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture (2023–27).
His work has been widely collected and exhibited in several museums around the world: Fitzwilliam Museum, Classical Archaeology Museum and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Wereldmuseum (formerly Tropenmuseum), Amsterdam; Penn Museum, Philadelphia; Brooklyn Museum, New York, among others.
Since 2011 Kourbaj’s artwork has reflected the suffering of his fellow Syrians and the destruction of his cultural heritage. His Dark Water, Burning World is in the permanent collection of the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum. For the BBC’s ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects,’ Neil MacGregor (the former director of the British Museum) chose it as the 101st object. In 2024, Kourbaj’s work was displayed in concurrent solo exhibitions: Urgent Archive and You are not you and home is not home at Kettle’s Yard and Heong Gallery (respectively) in Cambridge (2 March – 26 May 2024).