My name is Hanan Saif and I’m a Syrian artist; I’m a doctoral student at the Hungarian University of Fine Art.
I lived in Damascus in the years of war. Because of that everything inside me changed my beliefs, my dreams, and of course my art.
I started to look for a true meaning for everything, for true art.
The idea behind my concept is about the mutual influence of what I consider my two most important objects (mother and child) and their relation to the world and how they interact within it. I think this binary is unlimited. However, as a Syrian woman who flees the war and carries with her all the memories would always think ‘We all live in danger’.
Coming back from a Middle Eastern background I witnessed the limitation of freedom and rights for women and children, of course, as an artist, it was my concern to point out this issue and present it to the whole world. When I came and lived in Hungary for more than six years, I think I realized that these limitations are just transforming into another shape but are not disappearing.
I acknowledge that difficulties will be there no matter who you are or where you are. In my artworks, I’m very interested in projecting this state of multiple lives, because as a Syrian I live it now I’m in the middle of no place.
Showing the effect or the influence shared between a mother and her child with different interpretations and under different circumstances reflects my pursuit to reach a Utopian Fantasy where the future is better.
My perspective through my journey changed from talking about a particular case of me as a mother, then I talked about a nation, and then realizing that mother would represent me and you, it’s nature.
I always worked with the figure of a woman and her children to represent the present and the future.
My paintings depict us when we are the coal/fuel for the next human/beings, I’m picturing the fossils underneath the ground, and I’m imagining the prints over a rock.
Our present and future would perish under layers of dust and I don’t have enough courage to point out this issue in an indirect way. I think we really have reached the limit and I’m now being brutally saying to everyone PLEASE STOP!