Workshop Dubai to host One Wound, One Smile exhibition

The Workshop Dubai will be hosting One Wound, One Smile, a solo exhibition by Syrian painter Majd Kurdieh from December 6 until January 6.

In Kurdieh’s characteristic fashion, complex human emotions and experiences are made discernible through characters and elements. Sadness is as big as a whale. Sorrow is a flood, its waves crashing. The wound is nostalgia, hope, and sorrow all at once. The heart is a fish, finding its place in the vast ocean of this world. She is beauty. He is desire. And together, Fasoon and Fasooneh are the greatest prize life has to offer.

Two apparently opposing forces appear again and again in Majd Kurdieh’s latest exhibition. The wound is one, the smile is the other.

“While the wound appears clearly in a few paintings, it is silently present in every detail. One of the best-known unhealable wounds is hope. Yet, ironically, we smile when we possess it. Through this flood of hardship, the waves crash, and hope, which could appear as a defect in the brain, is something every living human holds on to — even if it’s only the hope that the sun will rise again. Sometimes we smile, not because of something great, but because we found a safe haven in the midst of the flood. This smile, which is incomplete as we remember the ones that still crash through the waves, can be made whole only by the other,” said Majd Kurdieh.