Nagham Hodaifa

Nagham Hodaifa

Hodaifa is a painter and performance artist born in 1981 in al-Kafer Swaida in Syria and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Art in Damascus in 2003. She gained her PhD in the History of Art from the Sorbonne University in 2015, and has gone on to publish in books and journals. She lives and works in Paris.

She had her first solo exhibition at just 16 years old and continues to show extensively, sometimes creating multidisciplinary events by combining painting with dance, music, poetry and calligraphy. She has sometimes collaborated with others, including physicists, computer engineers and musicians.

“My work tells the story of the human condition through the representation of the body. In my pictorial universe, the human body, dancing or prostrated, whole or fragmented, is continuously transforming; body-landscape, embryo, geography of the intimate, sometimes headless or even faceless.”

Hodaifa’s work has been acquired by the Arab World Institute, Galerie Claude Lemand and by private collectors in London, Paris, Vienna, Buenos Aires, Brač, Berlin and Milan.