Vian Sora’s powerful new exhibition Outerworlds, on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) through September 7, is visually engaging on the surface with striking and often contradictory splashes of color and texture, but they draw you into their depths the more you learn about and hear from the artist.
For the opening weekend of Sora’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., SBMA Chief Curator James Glisson hosted an onstage conversation with the 49-year-old artist, who was born in Baghdad and had her first solo exhibition in Iraq in 2001. She lived through the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent insurgency. After leaving Iraq, she sought refugee status for her family in the United Arab Emirates, and then eventually settled in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2009, where she now lives with her husband.
“Forest Remains,” a 2023 acquisition by SBMA, which is on view as part of Outerworlds, is a very personal piece for Sora. “I look at this work as a self-portrait, and it really marks the beginning of the change of the technique that I used. I started breaking form and creating new compositions through breaking those forms. This work actually deals with the whole idea of migration and assimilating in a new place, and the struggle that was required to get my citizenship and to get my family to America who are not all of them actually able to stay.”
She continued, “There’s all that struggle that is associated with the path of immigration, especially for Iraqis, and just the physical change that I was dealing with and the terrain change led into this work.”
The piece depicts a contorted, forest-like landscape with bodily imagery appearing among the abstracted scene. Like all of the work on view, a variety of radiant paints are splashed, poured, and sprayed onto the canvas. There can be more than 50 layers of oil and acrylic paint in a single work.
It’s a way of giving concrete form to the chaos of life, Sora explained. So, the work appears to be abstract on the surface, but actually isn’t, Glisson said.
Sora’s style has evolved considerably over the years. “I had a major hysterectomy in 2015 and I woke up painting differently,” shared Sora. “Basically, I woke up and something happened in my brain, because of previous car accident surgeries and being exposed to anesthesia a lot. It’s like something happens in your brain where you unleash something else within whatever field you’re working within.”
In her case, she was done working with monotones. “I woke up from that surgery painting boldly … you lose organs; you lose your fertility; you lose a lot of things. That was a concern, and I was happy, honestly, to lose it. You start feeling better and painting differently. … All my older work — it looked completely different. So, it was like a breakthrough for me, and I followed it with no fear, and led into the new work.”
The exhibition title, Outerworlds, comes from two works (“Morphing” and “Floodgates”) that Sora finished in 2021 while in Berlin on a residency during a period of intermittent pandemic lockdowns, when she started to return to social spaces. As Glisson stated, “The title is also a reminder that for all of her paintings’ interiority and feeling of completeness — as if there was an entire world laid down on the canvas — these paintings reference cycles of nature and human history. There is growth, decay, violence, healing, frenzy, and quiescence.”
When it leaves Santa Barbara, the exhibition will travel around the United States to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Asia Society Texas Center.
“I hope this exhibition will illuminate the struggle, courage, and dissonance continuously faced by war survivors that exist between worlds,” stated Sora. “As displaced people and immigrants constantly strive to make sense of our new orbits, these paintings depict a journey through distant time and space in order to reach safety. … I cherish the opportunity that these museums open their doors for our culture and stories to be shared.”
From The Santa Barbara Independent website.
