Description:

Within the Atassi Foundation’s Modern Art of Syria Archive (MASA) project, we hereby publish the archives of the Syrian artist Leila Nseir (1941–2023).

Based on recorded oral consent by the artist in presence of poets Monzer Amasri and Maher Alraai, and young artist Wadie Atfe, the archive of Leila Nseir was sent to us by the young Syrian artist Ahmad Kasha, who became a spiritual son to Nseir over the last decade of her life. Motivated by our common goals of documenting and promoting Syrian art, Kasha collated and scanned all the documents included in this archive.

We received digitally nearly 700 documents, of which 478 have been included in this release. The rest has been excluded for either being unpublishable, duplicated, incomplete, or due to conflicting copyrights.

This archive is mostly in the Arabic language and is divided into seven main folders: Press clippings (178), Documents (12), Exhibition materials (21), Letters (3), Photos (226), Writings (15), Recordings (23 - available upon request).

The archive draws a complete profile of a personal and intellectual life dedicated fully to art. In the articles about Nseir – most of which were published in local Syrian newspapers – as well as in 43 interviews with her, Nseir expresses her views regarding general topics. She discussed societal issues, political matters, as well as artistic debates, and showed a strong belief in the notion that art is inseparable from society. Thus, she painted it, and painted for it.

Her works tackled issues such as wars, like her two paintings entitled Vietnam (1966) and Racism (1965), both presented at the travelling Syrian exhibition in Europe in 1986. In interviews, Nseir discussed existential questions, the creative and professional concerns of Syrian artists, and the gap between them and the audience. In one such interview in 1980 she stated that the “artist belongs to a certain era, class, and nation.”

Nseir also expressed her views on abstract tendencies in Syria, art criticism, the necessity to experiment, and freedom in art practices. She also reflected upon feminist topics: “I have not got married due to my overwhelming sense of motherhood” (1983), and articulated her opinions in other instances as a matter of socio-political commitment, for example attributing the scarcity of females artists to the fact that the “outperforming woman suffers from the sadism of the man” (1989).

The documents of this archive also trace the artist’s solo and group exhibitions, namely those organised within Syria. It should be noted that exhibition booklets do mention the dates of her solo and group exhibitions abroad – Moscow, Sofia, Paris, Budapest, Rabat, Kuwait and Baghdad – the archive, however, does not include any material from such shows.

Through her various exhibitions, Nseir’s feminist approach resurfaces regularly, and this becomes clear from the list of group exhibitions such as Arab Woman and Art Creativity, organized by the Fine Arts Syndicate in Damascus and in collaboration with the General Union of Syrian Women in 1975 and an exhibition of the works of female artists Leila Nseir, Asma Fayoumi, Greta Alwani and Shalabiya Ibrahim co-organised by the Bulgarian Cultural Centre and the Fine Arts Syndicate in Damascus in 1984. Nseir was also involved in the art criticism scene and published a research paper about her career and that of other female artists, entitled ‘Contribution of Syrian Female artists in the Syrian Plastic Art’ on the occasion of an exhibition held at Baladna Art Gallery in the Jordanian capital of Amman in 1996.

A prominent document in this archive the ‘The Notebook of Poetry and Sculpture’, which she completed between the years 1969 and 1972, into which she included poetic diaries, short stories and sketches for sculptures.

The sketches were not pictorial descriptions of the writings, but rather independent drawings showcasing Nseir’s sculptural vision, and highlighting the influences of local civilizations on her work. Also evident in these sketches are her endeavors to show the mass of the material, the fines shades of shadow, and the bright light.

Her poetry is written in free verse and shows a Baudelaire-like tendency. Among the recurrent images are gouged out eyes, rats, scaleless fish, flowers without petals, graves, silence and blackness. She talks about the hardships of life, as well as stories of love and solitude. Nseir wrote on 29 July 1970:

Leaves are falling
My eyes are bloody
for the remains of a flower
plucked every day
stripped
piece
by piece.
In another section dated 11 December 1970, she wrote:
The small fish is imprisoned
and the sky is raining fish
to fill the hole
with fish
without scales
the surface of the hole
is glittering
with gouged out eyes
and on the edge
new scales grow

The photographs portion of the archive comprises the following sub-folders:

- 1960s: Personal and general photography related to professional meetings and encounters.

- Cairo, early 1960s: Photography documenting her years of study in Cairo along with her peers.

- Exhibitions: A non-exhaustive photographic record of some of her exhibitions, with Nseir appearing alongside the audience and other artists.

- Portraits: Personal photos of her across the years from 1959 till 2008.

- Miscellaneous