Vian Sora : House of Pearls

Her artistic foundation is largely self-guided, built on visits to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, where she was captivated by ancient Mesopotamian reliefs. Surrounded by art and culture from an early age—her mother ran the Al Mazad Al-Baghdadi art gallery, and her father operated an antiques business on Al-Mutanabbi Street, a historic area once bustling with bookstores and stalls—she grew up among writers, painters, and architects who profoundly shaped her early impressions of art. Immersing herself in the works of Jewad Selim and the sculptures of Mohamed Ghani Hikmet, she took a different path when the esteemed artist Faiq Hassan advised her against attending art school. Instead, she assisted the influential architect Qahtan Al-Medfai in organizing his first retrospective at Dijla Art Gallery. The cultural figures surrounding her were pivotal in the Arab art scene, now recognized as pioneers of that era.

Sora's studio practice in Baghdad flourished until the war escalated in the 2000s, prompting her to take a job with the Associated Press, where she witnessed the impacts of war on her community firsthand. In 2006, she fled Iraq, first to Turkey, where she studied calligraphy at the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts and took printmaking classes at the Istanbul Modern Museum. She then moved to Dubai before settling in Louisville, Kentucky. Throughout this journey, her practice evolved from figurative painting, inspired by the artists she once knew in Baghdad, to more abstract works.

In her studio, she pours herself into her art, using the act of painting as a grounding process. Her large-scale works feature complex layers of paint that she skillfully negotiates. Initially, she pours, spills, and sprays paint onto a flat canvas, allowing the materials to flow intuitively in a moment of free expression. Once the paint dries, she stands the canvas upright, reflecting on the chaotic layers before building upon them. Drawing inspiration from ancient Mesopotamian mural-making techniques, she creates a rich tapestry of color and texture, with small shapes emerging to evoke a dream-like quality, reminiscent of watching clouds shift—each glance revealing new interpretations open to the viewer's imagination.

Over the past decade, Sora has learned to channel her creativity, balancing intention with spontaneity. Initially inspired by a wide range of sources, she gradually narrows her focus, intentionally resisting recognizable figures in favor of ambiguity. For her, the paintings represent psychological landscapes and extensions of her own body. 

In the work debuting in the exhibition House of Pearls at The Third Line, Sora delves into the creation, extraction, and cultural significance of pearls. Characterized by scientific titles, this exhibition highlights themes of decomposition, regeneration, and the emergence of new life forms. Central to this body of work is the creation of pearls, formed by the convergence of molecules and environments responding to external challenges beneath the sea, paralleling similar processes in soil. The paintings explore the cycles of life and death, emphasizing regeneration after destruction. Sora is particularly fascinated by how things decompose only to reemerge in different forms, an obsession that manifests in a variety of ways.

The paintings in the exhibition form a cycle of their own. Plumes, the first piece created in this series, represents the physical struggle and tension involved in pearl formation—the storm at sea that leads to the creation of something new. Opalescent, is vibrant and glowing, serving as a metaphor for how the universe shapes individual identity. This is followed by Inhale and Exhale, two gestural paintings that depict the act of a shell opening to let energy in and out before closing, absorbing everything once again.  A more topographical piece, Olivine, reflects the changing state of nature, highlighting themes of climate change and memories of a once green landscape. And Biomimicry emphasizes the practice of drawing inspiration from nature to address human challenges. 

Through swaths of bright blue suggesting vast bodies of water and desert brown terrains, Sora blends her artistic process with scientific language, infusing her work with her ancestral heritage as a source of strength. Ultimately, she creates pieces that evoke a sense of spirituality, viewing her art as both archaic and futuristic. This reflects her belief that history and life function in a pendulum-like cycle, constantly repeating themselves. Each painting becomes a testament to her journey, embodying the intricate connections between personal experience, cultural memory, and the natural world.