Salvaging Memory with Issam Kourbaj
To look at Issam Kourbaj’s work is to meet the artist’s gaze—unflinching, intimate, human. His works ask us to keep looking, even when it may be difficult.
Issam Kourbaj creates works that emerge from conditions of upheaval. Catastrophe is not treated as a singular event but as an extended condition, sedimented within material culture. Suffering is not polished into beauty, nor shaped into a story that seeks closure. Instead, it settles into the materials of the work itself. Clay is pressed by hand. Fragments are gathered from elsewhere. Rusted metal, worn surfaces, and objects marked by time enter the work carrying the weight of their own journeys. Each material arrives with a past. Kourbaj allows these histories to remain visible—sometimes barely altered, sometimes only gently reconfigured. What might otherwise appear as evidence of ruin becomes something more attentive: a place where experience can rest.
Violence is translated into presence; it is sensed, and not shown. It lives in the distances between objects, in their fragile alignments, and in textures weathered by forces beyond his studio. Elements lean, balance, or hold one another with a precarity, as though shaped not only by the artist’s hand, but by weather, travel, and human touch. One first encounters the stillness. This stillness is neither emptiness nor retreat, but a charged pause—heavy with memory, without attempting to contain it. The works do not demand a specific interpretation. They ask only for time, and for the patience to look.
Sweida, Syria. Image credit: Google Maps.
Born in 1963 in Sweida, in southern Syria’s Druze region, Kourbaj grew up within a culture shaped by historical scarcity and material ingenuity. In a landscape marked by cycles of settlement, conquest, fragmentation, and displacement, resourcefulness became a condition of survival. Reusing materials was not an aesthetic choice but an everyday necessity. Unexploded ordnance left behind during the French Mandate was dismantled and reforged into domestic utensils; clothing was repurposed; objects circulated rather than discarded. Family histories—of quilts stitched from worn garments, and of lives lost while converting weapons into tools—formed an early ethical framework in which salvage and survival were inseparable.
From these conditions emerged a practice that examines how memory and ethical responsibility persist when territorial continuity collapses. His installations often resemble fragile assemblages formed from what has been left behind. They are not buildings in any conventional sense, but constellations of salvaged materials. Floors become sites of waiting, suspension, or passage; walls function as repositories of absence; everyday objects assume the role of witnesses. Architecture is stripped of authority and permanence, becoming instead a framework for holding vulnerability. Space is never neutral. It is shaped by displacement, charged with memory, and continually renegotiated through movement and loss.
Since relocating to Cambridge in 1990, Kourbaj has worked within another historically layered environment. His studio, situated above a former furniture shop, contains remnants of earlier commercial lives: abandoned ledgers, account books, and inventories. These documents recur throughout his work, stripped of their economic function and recontextualised as records of absence. What once measured value now indexes loss. Exchanges with poets, archaeologists, astronomers, dancers, and engineers further extend his inquiry into how knowledge moves across disciplines—how it is transmitted, interrupted, and reassembled.
Language occupies a complex position within this trajectory. Arriving in England with limited English, Kourbaj learned the language while teaching drawing. He often recalls learning to write the Arabic letter ‘ayn’—meaning both “letter” and “eye”—under his mother’s guidance. The story operates as both personal memory and epistemological insight: seeing precedes naming; drawing precedes language. This emphasis on visual cognition informs his resistance to declarative statements and explanatory texts within the work.
The outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011 introduced a prolonged silence in Kourbaj’s studio. Distance, safety, and institutional belonging produced a paralysis rooted in ethical hesitation. For several years Syria remained absent from his practice. This absence reflects an understanding that immediacy can violate as much as it reveals, and that certain histories require temporal distance before they can be approached without appropriation. Loss emerges through accumulation. A fragment appears, then another; materials recur, carrying echoes of earlier lives or former contexts. Gestures repeat with the cadence of recollection, and time seems to dilate within these spaces. What the artist ultimately asks of the viewer is not sympathy alone but attention: the discipline of remaining present before what resists explanation. His works invite a form of witnessing that accepts uncertainty, allowing unresolved histories to remain unresolved while still granting them the dignity of being seen.
Across geographies, Kourbaj’s installations function as portable architectures of diaspora. By privileging fragility over permanence, his work reframes architecture as an ethical practice—one concerned not with endurance or authority, but with care, witnessing, and responsibility. This current finds expression in We Are All Emigrants, a plaster cast of a pregnant woman’s abdomen that reimagines the womb as both sanctuary and point of departure. Displacement is framed not as a condition belonging to refugees alone, but as a universal human inheritance. Birth becomes the first act of emigration—our earliest departure from a place of safety into an uncertain world.
We Are All Emigrants.
In casting the pregnant abdomen and naming it We Are All Emigrants, the artist proposes a radical reframing of migration. The work returns the idea of departure to its most primordial threshold: the womb. Before borders, passports, or histories of displacement, there is this first passage—the moment when life itself begins with an act of leaving. The plaster cast, fixed and vulnerable, holds the paradox of origin and exile within a single form. It is at once shelter and frontier, fullness and imminent separation. By reducing the politics of migration to this intimate anatomy, the work dissolves the distance between the displaced and the settled. It reminds us that every life begins with a departure from a body that once held it completely; that the condition of movement, of crossing from one world into another, is not exceptional but universal. In this sense, the sculpture turns migration from a geopolitical crisis into an existential truth—a tender, unsettling recognition that to be born is already to emigrate.
In The Map of Absence, a perforated 1960s Butka Falcon camping tent becomes a fragile cartography of memory. Tiny punctures trace the map of Suweida—Kourbaj’s childhood neighbourhood—drawn by his brother, while a single charred circle marks the site of the family home. It is a map of a place that can no longer be returned to, yet one that resists erasure. The tent, emblem of temporary shelter, assumes a double role: both dwelling and wound, a structure that holds memory while offering no promise of repair.
Left: The Map of Absence. Right: A photograph from his studio in stormy England. While tidying up, he came across a copy of the map—drawn by his brother—that he had used for The Map of Absence.