A photographer from Idlib sees his own pictures on a Damascus wall

Ghaith Alsayed spent years photographing Syria from Idlib, three hundred kilometres and one front line away from the capital. This week his prints hang in Damascus, inside an unfinished building shaped like a rose. It is the first exhibition of his own work in his career.

For years his credit lines came from the northwest: Idlib, Sarmada, Atmeh, the displacement camps set among olive groves along the Turkish border. He worked there for the Associated Press, and he was there when the earthquake struck in February 2023. Idlib lies some 300 kilometres from Damascus, but the front lines between them made the distance absolute. The capital was a place he photographed the consequences of, never the place itself.

The building that now holds his work has its own arrested history. The Syria Trust for Development commissioned it as a children's discovery centre on the bank of the Barada, and Henning Larsen Architects — the practice behind the Copenhagen Opera House and Reykjavik's Harpa — won the competition with a plan in the form of a Damascene rose. Construction stopped in 2011. The shell was never fitted out. Outside its windows the Barada runs through central Damascus as a mostly dry concrete channel, emptied by upstream extraction and years of drought.

Forty-seven Syrian artists took part in Art Week Syria, founded and curated by Line Kouwatli with Artopia UAE as patron. Among them the photographer Ammar Abd Rabbo and painters of the country's so-called Apex Generation: Nihad Al Turk, Abdul Karim Majdal Al Beik, Othman Mousa, Mohannad Orabi, Kais Salman.

Most of them have been shown together before, but elsewhere. For the better part of a decade, the serious surveys of Syrian contemporary art took place in Dubai, Beirut and London, because that is where the artists and their galleries had gone. Ayyam Gallery, opened in Damascus in 2006 by the cousins Khaled and Hisham Samawi, moved to Dubai and Beirut in 2012. Mouna Atassi's gallery, founded in Homs in 1986 and moved to the capital in 1993, closed too, and became the Atassi Foundation in Dubai, where it built a digital archive of the art that had left.

What Kouwatli assembled was not a homecoming exhibition in the ceremonial sense. Nothing was restored for it. The rooms were borrowed as they stood, damage included, and the work was hung against it.

Before December 8, 2024, I never imagined that I would be in Damascus.

A short walk from the site stands the National Museum, closed in 2012, its mosaics and sculptures boxed or packed behind sandbags, reopening wing by wing from October 2018. The city has learned to bring things back in stages. Alsayed's photographs are one more stage — made from the outside, finally looked at from within.