Darat al Funun currently on

More of the –support surface” movement is to be found in an adjacent room. The astounding works by Vera Tamari (Palestine) are a series of photographs, in the background, and clay masks on poles, in the foreground. Her –Oracles from the sea” composition is made up of amazing faces in raw clay colour, symbolically representing the –coming back” process. More clay works by Faisal Samra (Saudi Arabia) complement Tamari's. This contemporary artist's collection, –Nabataeans”, is a collage of clay, paper and feathers, framed ingeniously in glass panes.

Making use of natural materials (straw, mud) and dyes (aniline, henna), Suleiman Mansour (Palestine) shows that anything can be turned into art. Next to his works, Moroccan Farid Belkahia's are also made using natural material (leather) and dye.

Nasser Soumi is present here as well with an imaginative and highly symbolic composition. People leaving Akka in 1948 could take nothing with them but the image of its sky, represented in small pieces of aniline-dyed cloth pegged to lines that come as an extension of his painted sea seen through an open window. Through it, beyond a boat on the sea, white houses are profiled on the horizon; a place engraved in the collective memory of a displaced people, next to the blue sky.

Nadim Muhsin (Iraq) is yet another artist who makes use of the square and of natural material (rice paper or sack cloth). His sculpture made of tin (two stylized silhouettes) is projected artistically against the white background wall and proves that, with talent and inspiration, everything can be used and turned into beautiful art work.

Completing the display in the room, Iraqi Shaker Hassan Said's works, spanning 30 years, illustrate the search for art, from Sufism to abstract, of a first-generation contemporary Arab artist. His philosophical approach, using numbers and symbols, is present, as is his more modern method, allowing work to flow out of the frame, excluding limitation. It is an artist's refusal to be encased in a mould, letting imagination and spirit soar.