Aysha E Arar: The princess from the land of olive trees

For her first museum exhibition in France, Aysha E Arar presents a selection of recent works and new productions created for the first floor of the Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne – château de Rochechouart.

Born in 1993 in Jaljulia, Aysha E Arar is a Palestinian multidisciplinary artist. Painter, draughtswoman, poet, video artist and performer, she seizes on the tales and legends of the Palestinian world to reread them in the light of the present day. Faced with the impossibility of representing today’s tragedy, the artist develops a metaphorical, dreamlike language. She adopts a lively, spontaneous drawing style that unfolds on various type of support, imagining a universe where real and fantasy bodies intermingle, where different species cohabit in harmony. In Rochechouart, Aysha E Arar deploys a body of work that is an ode to love and hope.

She draws inspiration from the castle’s fairy-tale world to imagine a realm of emancipation in opposition to colonial and patriarchal forces, as evidenced by the mural drawing in the first room. The exhibition continues with the presentation of the video Amphibia. In this animated video, the artist portrays a mermaid fighting for the rights of every women.

A room is then devoted to a series of works on shrouds, forming a space of contemplation at the heart of the exhibition.  The show concludes with a nearly eighteen-metre-long canvas created to echo the Renaissance fresco rooms nearby, a monumental display of the narrative potential of her work.

The Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne—Château de Rochechouart is run by the Haute-Vienne Council and is an officially recognized French museum receiving funding from the French Ministry of Culture.