Dani Hasrouni, Syrian photographer and artist
Born in Damascus, Syria in 1991
Lives and studies in Berlin, Germany
As an emergent young photographer and digital artist Dani Hasrouni already has proved his creative talent. Dani was born in 1991 in Damascus. In 2013, he graduated from his Bachelor’s degree at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Damascus, focusing on Visual Communication. In 2015, he began his Master’s degree at the same university. Dani came to Germany in 2016 in order to continue his studies, and immediately organized a first exhibition of his art in Ulm. The artist has also exhibited overseas: his work has been shown at Castleton University Gallery in the USA. Recently, Dani Hasrouni has chosen to settle in the German capital of Berlin.
Behind the lens of his camera, with his gaze full of sensitivity, Dani Hasrouni sets the scene: an introspective universe, conceptual and abstract where the shots of the Damascene photographer transcribe a strange, highly intimate and unreal atmosphere. Everything seems to be weightless, as if suspended out of context, while offering a blurred landscape populated with oneiric silhouettes. These evanescent creatures created by the photographer seem to haunt and transcend space and time, in a surprising dynamic of movement, fluidity and lightness.
Dani Hasrouni’s work explores the spatio-temporal qualities of technique, playing with what look like plumes of smoke left by the motion of a body in the image. In a beautiful range of pastel colors or black and white, the photographs interact with the medium in which the blur effect is explored as a means of making the change and fundamental instability of our being in the world visible. In unveiling through his images a reality buried beneath the apparent stability of our bodies, in offering us a poetic vision with a nostalgic emotion, the artist leads us immersed in the sensible.
Artist’s statement
In our universe, there are motion and stillness, light and dark, but is there a third state? We learned in physics that if the Cummins difference is present between two poles, then the current passes between the two, which implies that our world is built on a dualism based on continual motion, which it would be naive to counter-resist, and which can only move with it. Such motion also exists between soul and body, which should remain in its natural state, and should not be under siege. So in order to express this idea through photography, I choose informal people, and to add a magnified distortion effect, I use canvas curtains, lit in the background by a diffuse light. The silhouettes are shaped by leaving their footprints, between light and shadow, suggesting the soul that tries to synchronize with the body containing it. The expressiveness of movement allows silhouettes invest their forms as may be polymorphic and shimmering through the dissipation of the crystallized light in different values, this also reflects the proximity of the fabric that allows light to play between the two.
SYRIA.ART 