Intimate Trespasses
The Quiet Architecture of Feeling
At Sfeir-Semler Gallery’s Downtown Beirut space, Bayan Kiwan’s first solo exhibition with the gallery unfolds as a meditation on closeness, presence, and the delicate rhythms of everyday life. Titled Intimate Trespasses, the show invites viewers into a world where private gestures and fleeting moments are elevated into sustained visual experiences, unfolding across large-scale paintings and a complementary series of ceramic sculptures.
Born in Amman in 1995 and working between New York and Amman, Kiwan’s practice is rooted in a sustained attention to the domestic sphere - not as a backdrop, but as a living, breathing environment shaped by touch, memory, and shared time. Her works do not seek to narrate; instead, they linger, allowing small details and subtle interactions to accumulate into emotionally resonant spaces.
Spaces That Hold, Figures That Drift
At the heart of the exhibition is a monumental panoramic painting measuring nearly three and a half meters in width. The canvas stretches like a continuous room, its figures arranged in a soft choreography of leaning, reclining, and gathering. Rather than occupying fixed positions, bodies seem to drift across the surface, connected by overlapping gestures and shared glances.
Kiwan’s painterly language is one of gentle compression. The room folds into itself, and moments collapse into a single, sustained visual field. The effect is immersive rather than descriptive - viewers are not positioned outside the scene, but subtly drawn into its spatial and emotional logic.
Throughout the exhibition, the artist’s palette leans into reds, pinks, and warm tonal shifts that lend the works a sense of warmth and proximity. These colors do not simply describe surfaces; they create atmosphere, bathing figures and interiors alike in a soft, enveloping light.
The Poetry of the Everyday
Kiwan’s attention to detail is both tender and deliberate. A spoon left on a table, a T-shirt draped across a chair, a newspaper resting on a sideboard - these quiet elements form a visual vocabulary of the lived-in and the overlooked. Rather than acting as narrative clues, they function as emotional anchors, grounding the paintings in a sense of familiarity and presence.
In one of the exhibition’s most intimate works, two figures fold into one another in an embrace that feels both restful and sustaining. The surrounding environment - cushions, fabric, fruit arranged in a bowl - becomes an extension of the figures themselves. The boundaries between body and space blur, suggesting that intimacy is not confined to human connection alone, but extends to the objects and rooms that hold it.
Kiwan’s brushwork mirrors this sensibility. Edges soften, contours dissolve, and layers of paint overlap in a way that feels less like construction and more like accumulation. Each canvas carries the trace of time spent - of looking, adjusting, returning.
Ceramics and the Intimacy of Touch
Kiwan’s ceramic works extend the emotional vocabulary of the paintings into three-dimensional form, transforming fragile material into vessels of closeness and vulnerability. Shaped by hand and marked by the pressure of fingers, folds, and gravity, the portraits seem to hover between image and object, never fully settling into either. Faces emerge and recede across uneven surfaces, blurred by glaze and softened by heat, as though memory itself were passing through the clay. These small-scale forms demand a different kind of attention - one that is slower, more intimate, and bodily attuned. Installed along the wall like quiet witnesses, the ceramics echo the gestures of the painted figures, reinforcing Kiwan’s ongoing meditation on how touch, proximity, and care can be embedded not only in scenes, but in the very material of the work itself.
Artist Profile: Bayan Kiwan
Bayan Kiwan (b. 1995, Amman) is a Palestinian-Jordanian artist working primarily in painting and ceramics. She holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Jordan, an MA in Art, Gender, and Sexuality with a focus on the Arab world from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and an MFA from Hunter College in New York.
Her practice centers on the exploration of domestic spaces, everyday gestures, and the emotional dimensions of closeness and care. Through layered compositions and tactile materials, Kiwan creates environments that invite viewers into moments of quiet observation and sensory engagement. Working between New York and Amman, she continues to develop a body of work that foregrounds the subtle, often unnoticed exchanges that shape shared experience.
Written by Soraya. Copyright of Naso Art Journal.