As a Person and an Artist

Interview with Rasha Deeb

On a sunny afternoon of the second day of a new year, the artist Rasha Deeb sat down with Anna Jäger to talk about how to translate life effects into painting and sculpture, the irreversible definitiveness of carving wood, the refusal of being put in simplistic categories, and the big man’s fear of small birds.

Anna Jäger: Do you remember the first moment when you thought
about yourself as an artist?
Rasha Deeb: I do! I was 15 years old. I was drawing the figure of a woman, just for myself when I suddenly realized: Oh, I can really draw! It came with that surprise of finding something that you have within yourself without knowing about it. And I started to believe it and couldn’t see myself being anything but an artist. And I have never stopped believing it and believing
in myself. You see, despite being a good student, I could never find myself in school. I never experienced anything touching my heart there. I never experienced anything there that made me think: That is me! My family has no background in the arts. And the schools in Syria didn’t offer any materials or tools for art education. So I started to train myself and save my pocket money to buy supplies like colors and such. After a while, my family realized how serious I am about this and they began to support me.

AJ: So with your own confidence you could convince your family of what you were already certain?
RD: Exactly! In the beginning, my mother was very much against it until she couldn’t resist any longer and had to admit: I have an artist at home and not a normal child. (laughs) After finishing high school, I studied sculpture for six years, first at the Institute of Applied Arts and then at the University of Damascus.

AJ: Which practices have you developed after your formal education?
RD: I am mostly focusing on paintings and sculptures. During the war in Syria, we had no electricity, no tools. So I started to draw since you don’t need much to draw unlike making sculptures for which you need a lot of material. I just had to continue to let out what is inside of me — be it in Syria or in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, or Germany.
AJ: In which way would you say that your training in sculpture informs your drawing and your understanding of form?
RD: What matters most to me as an artist is an idea inside of me. Everything else — material, form, colors — has to follow this idea. You will find a way to let it out, it can be anything: dancing, drawing, sculpture. Of course, my education and familiarity with shaping materials have also shaped me. But I feel like I have two different personalities in me which express themselves in different ways: one follows abstract modes through sculpture and the other one examines portraits, which means other people, in paintings. And this is what I realized during my six years of art school. In a way, painting always felt like the more liberating form of expression since my formal training is in sculpture.

AJ: Since ideas are at the center for you: what is keeping you awake at the moment?
RD: I am concentrating on looking deeply into myself. I was about to get lost by looking too much at what is going on outside. Especially being in a war, there is always so much happening around you. So I realized that I have to start to look into myself and to understand the changes inside me. What do I look like on the inside, and not on the outside? What are the memories that
I have? One of my last sculptural projects was “Impact” — in which I am examining the effects of what has been happening to my soul. By having been touched liked this, I wondered how things will change and what might remain.
My paintings always feature figures, with or without faces. I carry them in my memory, they are always people I saw — during the war. What I put into the painting is the effect the face had on me.
AJ: By looking so closely into yourself, would you say your works are a sort of an expanded diary?
RD: Yes, the paintings are exactly like that, like a diary. The sculptures, no, they are not about the moment and the memory. The sculptures begin after the process of the diary. So one could say I keep a diary, but with paintings not with words.
AJ: How is your creative process?
RD: Everything starts with the idea. I have to have an idea first. I don’t draw and through that something develops, no. I have the idea first and then I look deeply into myself, into my feelings. I think it through completely, I see the painting or the sculpture before anything else.
Of course, there is a difference between sculpture and painting, since for a sculpture you should really know what you are going to do. If you take too much away from a sculpture, you cannot put it back. For a painting, an outline suffices and then form and color will follow in the moment. But a sculpture comes out of different ways of thinking and working. The painting is the moment, the now, but a sculpture is not just now, it develops over a long time. I work mostly with wood, metal, and stone which are quite decisive, once you worked on them, you cannot go back. I can show you some?
Rasha takes out her phone and shows me some of her latest works which all follow traces around the idea of effect and changes.
RD: Do you see the dance in the shapes? Through them I image life. I
look at these cubes. I imagine their shapes and search for movement within them. Like a lenticular cloud. Then the shape can begin to become free, or to seem to be free. I have often imagined the effects of steady drops on the water’s surface, or the wind’s blow on a rag. This led me to go deeper into the meaning and the spirit of pieces which are scattered without care.
I guess I am trying to understand effects on material, souls, and so on because I still feel the touch. You know, I really changed completely after everything
that happened in connection to the war. I am a different person. So my work is about that: Which parts of me really changed and how?

AJ: So you are trying to find out who you are now as a person and an artist, which is probably inseparable?
RD: Yes, exactly! As a person and an artist, and not as a refugee. I don’t work like this and I constantly have to fight this perspective. I was an artist before I
came to Europe. Of course the experience of being a refugee is part of my life but still as an artist whatever life gives me is what influences also my work.

AJ: And this complexity demands subtlety, also in the art world, in order to engage with this current reality in a sincere way. What you are asking for is an encounter without cheap and fixed political or social explanations. Would you say that these circumstances have also informed your direction of concentrating on inner life of the individual?
RD: Exactly, this is very right. I mean, if I don’t understand myself I cannot understand what is going on around me. But you see, it is hard for me to put this into words the way you do. To express these observations and processes I choose different materials. Art is a different language. If I can explain it, I could write. If I can explain it through words, why would I paint?
AJ: Yet, by defying these simplistic notions and rhetorics of masses, of streams and waves, which prevent us from seeing individuals, souls there is something quite political in your practices of focussing inward.
RD: Yes, but you cannot run from yourself. I am here, at this point.
How can I not reflect on it?
Yet, I feel that a lot of personal details are put and read into my art which gets mixed up in a way not intended. You don’t need to know anything about me to look at my art. So certain aspects of my life are highlighted and used to explain or even promote my work.
It is hard when your personal life is used in this context but I am in two minds about it. There are situations when it makes sense because we still need to talk about what is going on. To use an artist’s personal background might be a way to open the doors for this discussion. Even with this good intention it is hard for the artist and I have my limits of what I can accept. I feel like I am in a constant evaluation of the situation.

AJ: So the question at stake is not if we talk about painful realities like war and displacement but how?
RD: Exactly and this how is a constant process of negotiation. There are many contexts where it makes sense to even use my name under the whole “refugee” category — when it helps to portray the situation of refugees in a more complex and positive way. But if you use my name for opportunism and to make a career out of it, I cannot accept it. You cannot sell our blood!
AJ: Who these projects are talking to becomes a core question then, no? To whom do you think you need to explain who someone is? And which rhetorics is being used and what is your idea of society?
RD: I agree. And sometimes I refuse to play along when I am invited to cultural programmes or exhibitions that are all about refugees. My work doesn’t follow a certain aesthetics that might be expected and in public talks I don’t talk about my personal trauma. I talk about art and my practise which still includes the experiences I made. I am avoiding simple or overused terms that give people the illusion to know what they mean, like “refugee.”
AJ: Terms that are being repeated and repeated in their violence even
by well-meaning people deciding how to talk about a situation that is
not their own experience.
RD: I once made a painting of a big man and a small bird. And the big man looked like he was very afraid of the small bird. I often feel that many Europeans are this big man, being afraid of everything. It might be that they are afraid to look closely and carefully at refugees and their situation. And that is why they use these terms as a tool not to have to look too closely.

AJ: Maybe people are also scared of the changes in society as well as the fact that they have to change themselves?
RD: Something will change, of course. There is no other way. The question is, how. And not everyone is open for changes. But this is life.
In the same way, we had and have to deal with the effects caused by the war in Syria. And some of these effects have reached Europe, with us. Again, this idea of effects is at the center of my work at the moment.
AJ: Talking about changes now at the moment of entering into a new year and decade — what are you envisioning for your near future?
RD: Something big! (laughs) It is the first time that I have this feeling at the beginning of the year: there is a strong energy. The situation around the world is not really stable so something has to happen. For me personally, the maxim is to keep working as an artist.

Born in 1988 in Damascus, Syria, Rasha Deeb graduated in Fine Arts in 2014 at Damascus University, specializing in sculpture. Before graduating, she attended a number of workshops and took part in exhibitions including the Turquoise, sea and earth workshop in Istanbul, in 2010; the International Festival of Visual Arts for Young Artists in Gorgan, Iran, in 2012, where she came second; and an exhibition at the Cultural Centre in Damascus, in 2013.
After graduating, Rasha Deeb left Syria and headed to Lebanon, then Greece, and finally Germany, where some of her artworks were displayed in a number of exhibitions between 2016 and 2018.
The trauma of war has directly impacted her creative output, particularly the choice of subjects and the colors she uses in her paintings. She has experimented with several methods and styles but prefers abstraction in sculpture and expressionism in painting, which allows her to give voice to people who live in fear and who, like paintings, cannot speak or be heard.
Rasha Deeb’s projects include The Beauty, the Harmony, a wooden sculpture measuring 2.8 meters in height and representing the effect of life on the soul, similar to ripples made by droplets on the surface of the water, with particular
reference to the way her own life and experience have affected and changed her.
Rasha Deeb is also one of the artists featured in the Italian documentary Torn, co-produced by UNHCR, in which Italian actor and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Alessandro Gassmann talk to Syrian musicians, actors, directors, artists, and poets about their lives in the aftermath of the civil war.

This article was originally published in August 2020 in Folios n.3 “Golden Sea”, the Moleskine Foundation cultural publication.

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