‘It was my way to resist’: the Iraqi-born artist who grew up under a dictator
Examining the Iraqi artist Vian Sora’s magnificent paintings, the first thing that stands out is her color palette. A full spectrum of neons – greens, blues, oranges, yellows and reds – drip and seep across earthy ochers and browns. These oppositional colors immediately catch the eye, and then leave a viewer wondering how Sora can so effortlessly situate them alongside each other.
Colors are one of the many oppositions that Sora elegantly reconciles at her debut New York City show, Vian Sora: End of Hostilities, on view at David Nolan Gallery. The long and winding road that the Baghdad-born, Louisville, Kentucky–based painter has taken throughout her tumultuous life and career sits portentously in these meditative, appealing works that balance abstraction with figuration.
“Because my work focused for a while on the chaotic events that informed my life, I started going into the more joyful side of things,” Sora told me. “This show marks the invasion of Iraq, which is an event that really changed my life. So there are works dealing with some of these themes, but also aspects of life coming back, rebuilding, rebirth.”
Born in 1976, Sora spent most of the first three decades of her life living under dictatorship and intermittent warfare, ultimately enduring the terror of living in a war zone following the US invasion of her country in 2003. She made her way out of Iraq for good in 2006 and spent three years passing through Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and other countries before managing to immigrate to the US, then worked for well over a decade to bring her surviving family members over. “When I arrived, I was very traumatized,” Sora said. “The trauma was very fresh, and I couldn’t even be in a big city, so I felt like Louisville was a good, quiet place to lick my wounds, as they say. Economically, it was also easier to bring my family members over here.”
Sora grew up around art, with her father owning an art galley and her mother’s family an antiques auction house. She began painting in the 1990s while enrolled at Al Mansour University, where she eventually earned a degree in computer science, one of only four women in her class. Her first solo show was in 2001 at Inaa Art Gallery in Baghdad, and she has continued to exhibit steadily ever since, even during times of war and dislocation. Throughout Sora’s many moves and the political turmoil that has surrounded her, her art has been a touchstone. “My work is an act of resistance,” said Sora. “It was my way to resist when I was in Iraq, and it’s my way to resist now, to exist in an America that is very divided. The work became a kind of identity for me.”
End of Hostilities marks the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, which began in March 2003. The show is Sora’s first in New York City, following up a successful show in Los Angeles last year. End of Hostilities continues her career-long engagement with the hardships around her life in Iraq, while also showing her opening up new space to engage with themes of immigration, her experience as a Kurdish Iraqi living in America, and her hopes for a better future. “I want to somehow represent that we can all live together. What’s normal for me is to be as diverse as possible. This is like a roadmap for myself to make sense of things.”
The body of work on show is strongly unified, each painting working from the similar frame of bright colors backgrounding a beguiling mixture of shapes done in a combination of neons and earth tones. Sora’s fascination with Mesopotamia and the ancient history of the Iraqi lands is paired with more contemporary aspects of her immigrant experience, as attested to by paintings like Verdict, which seems to channel the precarity Sora has felt throughout her life, and Fruition, which seems to represent some of the strands of Sora’s life that have healed and unified as she has created a life for her family in America.
Sora has not always made the bold neons that make End of Hostilities such a success a central part of her artistic practice. She attributes her use of them to a hysterectomy that she underwent in 2015. “I woke up from that surgery feeling like I didn’t have anything left to lose. I woke up painting in a different color palette. This is a service you do to your identity.”
According to Sora, her initial years in the US were characterized by apologizing for various aspects of her identity; after the surgery, she became more able to communicate viscerally and directly about her own personal truths. “Psychologically, I was just done with trying to live as an immigrant trying to prove she’s not a terrorist.” That change has come through in the colors that she uses to paint. “It was very gratifying for me to use these colors together. It was a reflection of the dichotomies that I bring together. It’s my own voice, my own way to get excited about the work.”
To create this body of work, Sora started with opposite colors, and from there followed where they led her. “The colors in a way choose themselves.” From opposing colors, she tried to embody all the dichotomies she attempts to hold as she lives in the US, all of the various, conflicting parts of her identity. Sora noted that her work with oppositions emerged in her art in a very unconscious way, and it has been a mainstay of her artistic output throughout her two decades of exhibiting her art work.
For Sora, this show at David Nolan Gallery is a breakthrough, both personally and professionally. She noted that for years she felt too overwhelmed to travel to New York City, but that now she feels ready to do so. “I own my voice in a different way now. I feel like I’m ready – it’s amazing how you heal from things.”
With a first New York show being a career-defining moment for so many artists, Sora is eager to see where End of Hostilities takes her. Having worked so hard to get this far, she feels prepared to enjoy the excitement of it and bask in the moment. “New York is exciting for me on so many levels,” she said, it’s a magical and crazy place for artists. It’s where you need to be if you want to be an artist in the US. I’m very excited to have my first solo show there.”
Vian Sora: End of Hostilities is on view at David Nolan Gallery in New York from 26 October to 9 December