Syrian artist depicts women’s revolutionary outlook

Beginning and end, wedding and widowhood, black and white: a cinenamatic language in many of artist Hind Adnan’s works. The forgotten look revolution: a woman looking from an unusual angle above or a neglected corner. The history of the female body is closely related to that of art, and it is not far from the truth to say that they are synonymous.

*Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment of six-part stories about six Arab women  artists devoting themselves to creating different style of art and innovating their methods of expression for “revolutionary” change. 

Hind Adnan The Forgotten Look Revolution 

Art is based on reconstruction. Its ingredients are recreated through a magic machine invented by art and these create a unique world exclusive to the artist. Artists did not invent lines, nor did they create their “world” from nothing or raise up their heavens with no visible supports, but they have recycled the world carrying their genes of creativity and DNA. This is the secret of identifying an artist without signing his work or knowing his name. The work introduces its painter.

Stagnation, inertia and adherence to conventions destroy art, which is based on resisting monotony and symmetry. Revolution against all that is the key to art and the basic explanation of the works of artist Hind Adnan, who paints the female body as the domain of her works.

The history of painting the female body is closely related to that of art, and it is not far from the truth to say that they are synonymous. This type of painting is ages long, and it is extremely difficult to find any innovation in it, and until we find one art will have developed a different approach, and that is what we see in most of Hind Adnan’s works.

It is that forgotten look revolution, the hidden dimension. A woman looks from an unusual angle above or a neglected corner, flying through the painting, covering the heavy body with the features of an angel in a hidden sky. Transparent colours enlighten more than arouse, the direct look elicits the loving look, economy of colour versus strong hidden feelings.

When you look at two works side by side you may say they are identical, but a closer look reveals minor differences, as if borrowing the idea of motion pictures from the world of cinema. She excludes stillness from her sleeping being and dreaming world. She started this art project recalling the eagle eye which watches the place from above, but she brought the eagle home and in the women’s world, amid contemplation, review, looking through the winds to an unseen world, a nap after tiredness we perceive and a restful sitting we look forward to.

Hind left Syria for Egypt to study painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo where she joined a family of artists. Since her graduation and for twenty years exhibiting her works in Arab and Western capitals she made her name synonymous with women’s revolutionary outlook, though her women do not display posters or take to the streets, but their revolution begins at home, discovering forgotten moments and neglected corners, using the main elements of artistic structure skilfully: light versus shade, mass versus vacuum, shades of colour side by side; however, differences in the painting reflect the artist’s technical mastery.

Hind paints her models not to show their features which cameras do, but to explore their inner feelings, after giving a quick glimpse of feminine beauty to express a particular desire or feelings. In this way the body incorporates all elements of nature.

The depths which Hind Adnan wants to explore, aren’t they the ones which hide everything?