To encounter the work of Issam Kourbaj is to find oneself before the artist’s own gaze: unflinching, intimate and profoundly human. His works deny us the easy refuge of looking away, compelling us instead to linger before what is fractured and painful—and, in doing so, to witness not only suffering, but the irreducible humanity that endures within it.
Issam Kourbaj is an artist whose works arise from conditions of upheaval, treating catastrophe not as a singular rupture but as an enduring condition, sedimented in material and memory. Suffering is neither transmuted into beauty nor contained within narratives that offer closure; it remains unresolved, embedded in the very matter of the work. Clay is pressed by hand; fragments are gathered from elsewhere; rusted metal and objects marked by time enter bearing histories of their own. Kourbaj allows these histories to remain legible, sometimes barely altered, sometimes subtly reconfigured. What might seem the detritus of ruin becomes instead a space in which experience can be held without explanation. Violence resides not in spectacle but in tension: the distance between objects, their precarious equilibrium, and the fragile forces of time, displacement and chance.
Sweida, Syria. Image credit: Google Maps.
Born in 1963 in Sweida, in southern Syria’s Druze region, Kourbaj grew up in a culture shaped by scarcity, ingenuity and the quiet imperative to make do. In a landscape repeatedly subjected to settlement, conquest, fragmentation and displacement, resourcefulness was less an aesthetic sensibility than a condition of survival. Unexploded ordnance left from the French Mandate was dismantled and reforged into domestic utensils; clothing was repurposed; objects were made to circulate rather than be discarded. Family stories—of quilts stitched from worn garments, and of lives lost while turning weapons into tools—instilled an early ethic in which salvage and survival were inseparable. From this inheritance emerged a practice concerned with what remains when continuity itself has been ruptured, and with the persistence of memory and responsibility amid the disintegration of place.
Kourbaj’s installations often take the form of fragile assemblages of what has endured. They are not buildings in any conventional sense, but provisional architectures of salvaged matter: floors become sites of waiting or passage, walls repositories of absence, everyday objects silent witnesses. Architecture is stripped of its claims to permanence and authority, becoming instead a structure for vulnerability. Space, in Kourbaj’s hands, is never merely spatial; it is inhabited by memory, altered by displacement, and continually renegotiated through movement, loss and the precarious business of survival.
Since relocating to Cambridge in 1990, Kourbaj has worked within another environment layered with histories. His studio, above a former furniture shop, contains the remnants of its commercial past—ledgers, account books and inventories that have migrated from instruments of transaction into registers of absence. What once quantified value now bears witness to loss. His exchanges with poets, archaeologists, astronomers, dancers and engineers extend this inquiry beyond the visual, exploring how knowledge travels between disciplines: transmitted and interrupted, lost and recovered, continually reassembled into new forms of understanding.
Issam Kourbaj in his studio. Image credit: the artist.
Language occupies an unusually complex place in this trajectory. Arriving in England with little English, Kourbaj acquired the language while teaching drawing. He recalls learning to write the Arabic letter ‘ayn’—meaning both ‘letter’ and ‘eye’—under his mother’s guidance. The memory becomes more than autobiography: it suggests an epistemology in which seeing precedes naming, and drawing precedes language. It also illuminates his resistance to declarative statements and explanatory texts, allowing the work to communicate not by telling us what to see, but by compelling us to see before we begin to name.
The artist’s mother’s writing. Image credit: the artist.
The outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011 ushered in a prolonged silence in Kourbaj’s studio. Distance, questions of safety and the privileges—and limitations—of institutional belonging produced a paralysis born of ethical hesitation. For several years, Syria receded from his practice. Yet this silence was not indifference: it reflected an awareness that immediacy can violate as readily as it reveals, and that certain histories demand the perspective of time before they can be approached without appropriation. Loss, in Kourbaj’s work, accumulates quietly. One fragment gives way to another; materials recur, bearing intimations of lives and places once attached to them. Gestures acquire the rhythm of recollection, while time itself seems to dilate. What he ultimately asks of the viewer is not sympathy but attention—the discipline of remaining present before what refuses easy explanation. His work proposes a form of witnessing that accommodates uncertainty, permitting unresolved histories to remain so, while insisting upon their right to be seen.
Across geographies, Kourbaj’s installations become portable architectures of diaspora. By privileging fragility over permanence, he recasts architecture as an ethical practice: not an assertion of endurance or authority, but an exercise in care, witness and responsibility. This impulse finds particularly poignant expression in We Are All Emigrants, a plaster cast of a pregnant woman’s abdomen that recasts the womb as both sanctuary and point of departure. Displacement, here, belongs not to refugees alone but to the human condition itself. Birth becomes the first act of emigration: our inaugural departure from a place of absolute security into the unknowable world beyond.
We Are All Emigrants.
In casting the pregnant abdomen and naming it We Are All Emigrants, Kourbaj affects a radical rethinking of migration, returning the idea of departure to its most primordial threshold: the womb. Before borders, passports or histories of exile, there is this first passage—the moment when life begins with an act of leaving. Fixed yet vulnerable, the plaster cast contains within a single form the paradox of origin and exile: sanctuary and frontier, fullness and imminent separation. By locating the politics of migration within the most intimate of anatomies, Kourbaj dissolves the presumed distance between the displaced and the settled. Every life begins with a departure from a body that once contained it completely; movement, the crossing from one world into another, is therefore not an aberration but a universal condition. Migration is transformed from a geopolitical predicament into an existential truth: the 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 to which return may no longer be possible, yet which memory refuses to surrender to oblivion. The tent, emblem of provisional shelter, acquires a poignant doubleness: at once dwelling and wound, refuge and reminder, holding what remains while offering no consoling promise of repair.
Left: The Map of Absence. Right: A photograph from the artist’s studio. While tidying up, he came across a copy of the map—drawn by his brother—that he had used for this work. Image credit: the artist.