The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) will present Vian Sora: Outerworlds, a multi-venue mid-career survey of internationally renowned abstract painter Vian Sora, June 22-Sept. 7.
Organized jointly by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Asia Society Texas, Houston; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, the exhibit will assemble about 20 of Sora’s major works, charting her growth as an artist over a period of seven years (2016-23).
Outerworlds is the first solo museum show in the United States for Sora, who was born in 1976 in Baghdad, Iraq.
The exhibit will tell the story of how her multivalent paintings abstractly channel the tumultuous events of her life, ancient Mesopotamian history, and Iraq’s diverse natural landscapes, including its deserts, rivers, and archeological sites.
Outerworlds will debut at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art before traveling to the Speed Art Museum and Asia Society Texas.
Sora had her first solo exhibit in Iraq in 2001. She lived through the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War, invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent insurgency.
She later left Iraq, sought refugee status for her family in the United Arab Emirates, then eventually resettled in Kentucky.
“In 2016, Sora realized she needed to use abstraction to process all that she had lived through from Iraq to the settlement in the United States, SBMA said. “Her painting has transformed into a high-powered, bodily, and dynamic practice of controlled chaos.
“Her canvases reflect an array of radiant paints that are splashed, poured, and sprayed onto the canvas. Pigments run, accumulate, and clash, resulting in upwards of 50 layers of oil and acrylic paint in a single work.”
For Sora, the multilayered effects of her paintings give a concrete form to the chaos of life. The paintings reference both the realm of biology with its cycles of growth, decay and evolution, as well as the tumultuous history of her homeland, and inevitable recurrence of wars, violence, and eventual regeneration, SBMA said.
Describing her process, Sora said in a recent Observer interview: “I initiate each of my works with the canvas flat, then I utilize fast-drying spray paint, acrylics, pigments and inks, applying each … with brushes, sponges, spray bottles or my breath to move the medium, creating passages … like ventricles, sometimes tissue.
“I then use oil to control the disarray, layering various hues in an intuitive process … that attempts to constrain chaos, when life regenerates from detritus.”
The title Outerworlds comes from two eponymous works included in the exhibit
that Sora finished in 2021 while in Berlin on a residency. Sora completed the residency during a period of intermittent pandemic lockdowns, when she started to return to social spaces.
“The title is also a reminder that for all of her paintings’ interiority and feeling of completeness — as if there was an entire world laid down on the canvas — these paintings reference cycles of nature and human history. There is growth, decay, violence, healing, frenzy, and quiescence,” said James Glisson, Santa Barbara Museum of Art chief curator and curator of contemporary art.
“Indeed, “Morphing” (2023) and “Floodgates” (2021) both convey a generalized sense of transformation and change, while others, such as Antibodies (2020), reference the flagellum of viruses or cells,” SBMA said.
“This search for beauty amongst destruction is translated into my compositions through a conscious embrace of decay,” Sora has said. “For me these emotionally intense and bright ‘landscapes’ act as metaphors that simultaneously signify both the turmoil of war and the dynamics of change.”
“I hope this exhibition will illuminate the struggle, courage and dissonance continuously faced by war survivors that exist between worlds,” the artist said. “As displaced people and immigrants constantly strive to make sense of our new orbits, these paintings depict a journey through distant time and space in order to reach safety.”