Nadeen
Gorez Aldeen نادين
غرز الدين

Window Frame is a multimedia installation that carries the personal dimension of a life fully entangled: a physical element that was once an open window to life. Today it stands alone, witnessing absence.

A fragment of the shattered window (a found object) glows like a ray, preserving memory, evoking absence and passing on heritage. It becomes a shared barrier and a lens, something to look through, to imagine, to revive memory.

It belongs to a mountain whose people once watched through it, the traces of those whose villages were uprooted by displacement. As for us, we barely glimpse the remnants of a life gone by. For our children there remains almost nothing to see: only empty silhouettes, silent stories never read, and perhaps no light left for vision.

In the Golan Heights, a gentle breeze blushes the apple blossoms and dances with the cherry harvest as it falls to the ground. On the plateau, the wind of refusal rises in defence of its people.

The work responds to plans to seize the agricultural land of three Syrian villages in the occupied Golan, home to nearly 25,000 people, for a wind-turbine farm. The project would take about a quarter of their agricultural land, the main source of their livelihood.

“We support clean energy and the conservation of our environment, but the damage done by these turbines is far higher than their benefit.”

Fear After War deals with the Syrian civil war. It was inspired by the suffering Syrian children are living through, and holds their memories of the war in a surreal, absurd way.

Being Syrian yet holding an “undefined” nationality drove me to search, and so the project focuses on the mental confusion we are forced to live with every day. I made many dolls in one shape, each also carrying an undefined identity.

They are sewn from different fabrics, colours and patterns, collected from family members and relatives. These fabrics were once pillow covers and bed sheets, which protected us from the cold and kept us warm in winter.

During the war, souls fly and shatter into pieces. What remains are the dolls they carried throughout their childhood. All of those children were victims of the war; their toys remain as a trace of life.

The project evokes past, present and future, with time at its centre: its impact on the ruins of war and on the abandoned house. With the passage of time, the traces of those who once lived in these empty homes fade and disappear. Nature takes its course, and plants grow among the rubble as it slowly erodes.

I see art as therapy, a way of healing the scars war engraved in every soul that passed through this place: my grandmother, my mother, me, and my future daughter.

My mother was born in Suhayta, a village she was displaced from at the age of three. She remembers how, as children, they visited the abandoned homes and gathered what the residents had left behind, clothes and shoes, as if to give them the life they would have had. The project brings her memories together with sketches I drew of the ruins of forcibly abandoned houses in the deserted villages of the Golan Heights.

My parents’ generation was able to find remains of the displaced people who once lived in the abandoned villages. Our generation was hardly able to find traces of life. For our children there will be almost nothing left to see, only empty ruins, alone with untold stories that never got the chance to see light.

Refugees and Sorrow and Pain: drawings of bodies crowded into a boat, and of a map that comes apart at its edges.