BIO
Malda Smadi (b. Damascus, Syria) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in New York. Malda has recently completed an MFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (2023). She received a BFA in Visual Communication at the American University in Dubai in 2008, and in 2017 was granted a year-long fellowship in Abu Dhabi, UAE with the Salama Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. She is a recipient of the 2016 Sheikha Manal Young Artist Award in the Fine Arts category. Smadi has showcased her work in a number of group exhibitions in the US and the UAE, including Field Projects (New York City), Fathom Gallery (Washington DC), Nightingale-Brown House (Providence), Sotheby’s (Dubai), Alserkal Avenue (Dubai), Warehouse 421 (Abu Dhabi), among others.
STATEMENT
I consider notions of dislocation—whether geographical, emotional, or spiritual—where the disorder pushes the self to retreat to safety. For me, that safety is in my body, and where I locate my original home.
In this space of translocation, I am reconciling the feeling of belonging through several processes involving reflection and ritual in drawing, painting, and material foraging from the places I belong to moving between the UAE, Syria, Lebanon, and the US. Drawing and painting help discern the experience, while materiality, process, and sculpture embody the relationships and forms that emerge while meditating on home and the body as a moving vessel and container for attachments.
I am melding pain with beauty as a form of hope to transform the pervasive violence that follows the bodies of people from the Levant diaspora. Hope exists in the new generation that escaped the holds of the greatest burden, carrying the legacy and memory of our parents and ancestors through time and place.
Two questions emerge:
How do we relocate ourselves? How is memory of the homeland imprinted on the body?