Fears Fresh
2009–2011
Illustration printed on cotton paper from the artist’s notebook, 20 x 30 cm
Courtesy of Allartnow
The work is a series of prints (69 prints). I cut pieces from magazines and newspapers (photos, sentences, etc.) to produce new work and show it in a different context.
My work discusses an unclear feeling of fear I experienced in relation to the change I noticed in society around me and how the images start to change.
I am just a number
2016
Digital prints, 13.5 x 10.3 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Leaving is different for everyone. When something terrible happens, we might have options, or we might not. There are times when we can plan carefully and bring the things we need for the journey, and at other times, when emergency calls, we just might have to run, leaving everything from wallet to shoes behind. Muhammad Ali is an artist from Syria. It took him three months to reach Sweden in the spring of 2016, leaving five years of war in Syria behind. One of the few belongings on his journey: a notebook that has now become an artist’s book, a sensitive, fragile book, about the size of a passport. But this book is not a passport—it refuses simple identification. This is a book that compels with grim drawings of what it is like to leave home and a country of war behind, and to then be received in a new country without war, being registered as only a number. In this case, the number 20.
A fragment from a text by Joanna Sandell
Artist’s Bio:
Muhammad Ali is a Syrian artist who lives in Sweden. He has a multi-disciplinary approach in his artistic practice, which spans video, installation, digital art, painting and drawing and explores how meaning is constructed and understood. He often focuses on life as he blurs the boundaries between consciousness and unconsciousness.