SALMA REFASS
MANIFESTO
To Think. To Create. To Build the Utopia.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Art is beauty. Art is survival. Art is activism. A militancy towards continuous breathing and seeing a new world unfolding: one where art no longer needs to be political, where it is allowed to simply be beauty. Conceptualizing and convceiving my art in times of multiple genocides led me to this conclusion. My resistance through creation. A re-invention of the world and the self in the process.
My artistic process is deeply intuitive, guided by a profound reverence for the wisdom of the body and the intellect of the mind. I fall in love, many times a week, with people, ideas, things and forms - the primary sources of my work. The obsessions that fuel me, that push me to explore my own limits. Always tip-toeing at the frontier of the unrealistic and surrealist. I see art as a form of embodied knowledge,
a way of engaging with the world that transcends traditional modes of understanding.
I am captivated by the ways in which individuals navigate and inhabit space, observing how they come together to form a collective entity that transcends societal norms and expectations. Through my work, I seek to dismantle entrenched power structures and challenge the colonialist imaginaries that have long dominated our cultural landscape. What I do, create, make is rooted in the belief that art should serve (yes, the normative) as a vehicle for revolt and thought, and thus weave together elements of politics, pop culture, spirituality, and lived experience into my art. Each serie and piece serves as a catalyst for both introspection and rebellion, each piece an attempt at auto-ethnography.
Resistance. Remembrance. And Beauty. Where the transformative potential of art is harnessed in service of our liberation.