See All This is a new art platform in the Netherlands, existing both online and in print version, with a quarterly magazine and Website.
April 2016 – As part of a photography collaboration with See All This, Khaled Youssef from the SYRIA.ART association presents a small taste of the lives of three Syrian refugee artists living in the Netherlands. By Yara Said, Oussama Diab and Rabi Koria.
“With a desire to focus on the beauty and lift the veil on the talented artists from the Levant, the Dutch magazine ‘See All This’ cordially invited me to participate in a Syrian-Dutch project, an artistic and human adventure, thus offering me the opportunity to go once again beyond myself, and to meet with those who have experienced the earthquake, those who have known the sea ‒ once a space of dream, now a one-way road of life or death. Driven by hope, by the absolute of life, they advanced step by step in seeking a horizon for their colors and a space for their dreams, and it is in the Netherlands that they found refuge, and this is there they hope to find a future for their art.
Three days, three encounters, and emotions to cover several years. Oussama, a painter with a light brush and incontestable talent, amazed us with his smile and his love of life ‒ like a call to life, even when he speaks of death ‒ and also with the satisfaction he demonstrates for the small workshop in which he now expresses his talent, although in Damascus, his artist’s studio was a spacious creative haven. Yara, in her tender twenties who radiates beauty and youth, has already experienced war and migration, has as many tattoos on her skin as in her soul, and whose lips tell a little happy journey, while her eyes promise a brighter future. Rabi, an Assyrian who grew up in Holland and who paints about his roots, the distance and a double culture having in no way affected his love for a Syria that he has known only belatedly; the wonderment he testifies to his country of origin is mixed with a deep sorrow for the present, and these two contradictory feelings permeate his art with an abstraction of dreams.
In parallel to these encounters, an afterthought increases my hopes: these Dutch men and women who have devoted so much energy in helping these artists of my country prove that a human being can only be distinguished by his humanity.”
Article entitled “Among the Refugees: Artists in Exile” published on See All This Website: https://seeallthis.com/blog/khaled-youssef/
Article entitled “Devastated Country: Safe Haven on the Horizon” published in See All This magazine:
SYRIA.ART 