To look at Issam Kourbaj’s work is to meet the artist’s gaze—unflinching, intimate, human. It asks us to keep looking, even when it may be difficult.

Issam Kourbaj’s work emerges from conditions of upheaval, yet it avoids the familiar tendency in representations of conflict to turn catastrophe into spectacle. Suffering is not polished into beauty, nor shaped into a narrative that resolves neatly. Instead, it settles into the matter of the work itself: clay pressed by hand, fragments gathered from elsewhere, rusted metal, and surfaces worn by time and touch. These materials bear the traces of experience, carrying histories that resist easy narration.

Violence, in the artist’s world, is sensed rather than shown. It resides in the subtle distances between objects, in their fragile alignments, in textures weathered by forces beyond the studio. His works possess a profound stillness, though they are anything but vacant. What lingers with the viewer is not an image of destruction but a more enduring awareness: that of lives which have moved through catastrophe and continue to reverberate in the present.

Loss, in Kourbaj’s installations, is not staged as a singular, climactic event. It unfolds 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. Meaning does not announce itself at once but emerges gradually through sustained looking—the patient act of returning to what at first appears modest, provisional, even incomplete.

What the artist ultimately asks of the viewer is not sympathy alone. Sympathy is fleeting. Instead, he asks for 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.

The environments Kourbaj constructs resemble fragile assemblages formed from what has been left behind. They are not buildings in any conventional sense, but constellations of salvaged materials—objects gathered and reactivated through acts of care. Within them lies an acknowledgment of impermanence: the understanding that all structures—physical, political, human—remain vulnerable to time. Yet within these fragments something persists: a memory, a gesture, a trace of human presence that refuses to disappear.

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. His practice reflects this inheritance, examining how memory and ethical responsibility persist when territorial continuity collapses. Catastrophe, here, is not treated as an isolated event but as an extended condition, sedimented within material culture.

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.

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 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.

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. Grief is held with reverence. Loss becomes sacred.

Born in 1963 in Sweida, in southern Syria’s Druze region, Kourbaj was shaped within a culture defined by historical scarcity and material ingenuity. Coming from the layered history of a region shaped by cycles of settlement, conquest, fragmentation, and displacement, Kourbaj’s practice articulates how memory survives when territorial continuity collapses. His work is less concerned with narrating events than with examining the conditions under which memory, ethics, and accountability persist after rupture. Catastrophe, here, is not an episode but a condition—extended, unresolved, and sedimented within material culture.

*A screenshot taken from Google Maps of Sweida, Syria*

Floors become sites of waiting, suspension, or passage; walls act as repositories of absence; everyday objects assume the role of witnesses. Architecture is stripped of authority and permanence. It relinquishes control and becomes 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. Kourbaj treats space as lived terrain rather than abstract volume—an environment shaped by human precarity rather than designed control.

Reusing material was not a choice, but a necessity woven into daily life. Unexploded ordnance left behind by the French mandate was dismantled and reforged into domestic utensils; clothing was repurposed; materials circulated rather than discarded. Family histories—of quilts stitched from worn garments, of lives lost while converting weapons into tools—constituted an early ethical framework in which salvage was inseparable from survival.

*Let Them at Bay, insert caption and size*

Since relocating to Cambridge in 1990, Kourbaj has worked within another historically sedimented environment. His studio, situated above a former furniture shop, contains remnants of previous commercial lives: abandoned ledgers, account books, and inventories. These items recur throughout his work, stripped of economic function and recontextualised as records of absence. What once measured value now indexes loss. Exchanges with poets, archaeologists, astronomers, dancers, and engineers extend his inquiry into how knowledge is transmitted, interrupted, and reassembled across disciplinary boundaries.

Language occupies a complex and cautious position within this trajectory. Arriving in England with limited English, Kourbaj acquired language through the act of teaching drawing. He recalls learning to write the Arabic letter ‘ayn’—meaning both “letter” and “eye”—under his mother’s guidance. The anecdote functions as personal memory and as epistemological foundation: seeing precedes naming; drawing precedes language. This prioritisation of 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 period of 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.

*Precarious Passage, thirteen identical books, one for each year of the Syrian uprising*

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 dominance, but with care, witnessing, and responsibility. This current finds articulation 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 our first act of emigration—our earliest experience of leaving a place of safety for an uncertain world. Grief is held with reverence. Loss becomes sacred.

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—Issam 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 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.

*The artist sent me 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.*

Kourbaj’s work does not offer healing, nor does it promise redemption. It proposes something rarer: a space in which memory can reside without explanation, and where grief is permitted its full presence. Within these suspended architectures, the viewer is not asked to resolve loss, but to remain with it—to recognise, in that act of attention, our own vulnerability within its fragile and unfinished terrain.

Salvaging Memory with Issam Kourbaj

What Holds Us, Antony Gormley