NASO interviews: Razan AlSarraf
On Landscapes of Memory
“I like seeing drawing as writing, or documenting an idea or question,” she explains. From there, painting becomes a way to “capture layers of time into a flat 2D’ surface, in one moment.”
On Razan
“I was born in Kuwait then moved to New York as a late teen,” begins multidisciplinary artist Razan Alsarraf, “and spent the next eight or so years of my life in NYC and then LA, then moved back to Kuwait.
I’d consider home to be all of these places as I’ve managed to build a tight knit and beautiful community in each city that continues to grow and morph and move over time.”
Asked to describe herself into three words, Alsarraf smiles: curious, open, restless. Her days are shaped by a wide orbit of pleasures— cooking, reading, stargazing, “touching grass,” attempting to read her cat’s mind, tennis, swimming, curating playlists, and watching movies. “I love getting into rabbit holes of things that don’t make sense to me,” she says. “I’m equally recharged by spending time with people and nature as I do alone and with my thoughts.”
On Art
Art has always been a quiet constant. “It’s always been there,” Alsarraf recalls. “I only took it seriously when I started applying to universities after high school and got accepted into SVA. This is when it clicked that I’d be spending the rest of my life pursuing art.” Her earliest memory is strikingly tactile: preschool, a line drawing of a cat, a carefully shaded gradient. “I remember getting accused of cheating because of it,” she laughs.
On Process: From Research to Resonance
Alsarraf’s method is a deep excavation. “I love to deep dive into an area of interest and find out as much as I can about a topic before I generate any ideas,” she explains. She collects photographs, screenshots, and links, then sketches from life and observation. Only then does she move into painting, “abstracting the drawings into vast landscapes of their own,” before finishing with a “compilation of videos and sounds from the research edited to give context to the abstract works.”
On Sources of Inspiration
When asked what inspires her, the list unfurls without pause: “Nature, people, history, maps, rage, the wind, other people’s art, a really good meal, architecture— the list could go on endlessly.”
On Translating Human-Land Intimacy
Her practice-painting, video, and sound—centers on the way humans inhabit land. “I like seeing drawing as writing, or documenting an idea or question,” she explains. From there, painting becomes a way to “capture layers of time into a flat ‘2D’ surface, in one moment,” while video pushes the viewer to “experience time, in real time.”
On Kuwait and Los Angeles
Two geographies shape her creative rhythm. “I paint more in LA and draw more in Kuwait,” she notes. “I spend a lot of time in my car or indoors in Kuwait as opposed to the car/nature dyad that LA constantly offers. Shifts in the way I move around a space definitely influence my process and themes. The vastness of LA comes out in my video work and paintings there, where the claustrophobia of living in Kuwait comes out in the tightly drawn and darkly painted pieces.”
On Curating as Expanded Practice
Alsarraf also thrives as a curator. “I really do love curating,” she says. “I enjoy finding connections between artists’ lines of thought and their desires for understanding, putting different works in dialogue with each other to create even deeper meanings. There’s a lot of power and responsibility when it comes to curating; it’s a challenge I enjoy learning from. It informs my art practice by getting me to think more about the context of my work in the world outside of my studio.”
On A Career Milestone
Her recent solo exhibition with the land at The Sultan Gallery in Kuwait marked a turning point. “This was my first career solo exhibition so I really wanted to approach it as a survey of all the work I’ve created since starting my thesis around land and landscape, as opposed to just producing a new body of work,” she explains. “I wanted to show the timeline and process of my attempts at understanding and asking complex questions about land, belonging, extraction, etc.”
On Memory and Collective History
Themes of home, memory, and cultural resistance— particularly in relation to the Gulf and Palestine-run throughout her practice. For Alsarraf, balancing personal memory with collective history is an ongoing inquiry, one she approaches with both rigor and empathy.
On gharb, ghurba, ghubar (triptych)’, 2022
“When working on this piece, I was interested in what happens when charged moments and images that induce anger, rage or disgust are abstracted, diluted, distorted, broken down, repeated, and reconfigured. This painting started out with a series of photographs sourced from social media, national and international news, or WhatsApp broadcast messages. They emerged after a fight erupted in a legal session where the accuser proceeded to yell profanities, throw papers and eventually, his shoe at the accused. Photos of the fight immediately went viral online, both locally and in international news. My process began by saving these photographs, drawing them on paper and inserting them into digital programs like Procreate or Photoshop, cutting out and manipulating the figures and shapes, and reconfiguring them into a new composition. This image is further abstracted by painting it on paper with ink and very minimal brushstrokes and control, diluting them figuratively and conceptually until they form blobs or masses that begin to look like landscapes. These “landscapes” are then blown up into larger scale paintings where they are further abstracted, layered and built upon slowly to reveal their final forms.”
On Looking Forward
Next on the horizon: a solo exhibition at Hunna Art opening September 30 and more workshops at @studioeleven.kw in October. Beyond the immediate calendar, Alsarraf’s ambitions are expansive yet grounded. “Personally, teaching at a university, finding balance between being an artist for work’ and for my own livelihood, exhibiting in new and challenging locations, longer residencies, curating more complicated shows and working with my favorite artists, meeting even more inspiring people and building solidarity and tight friendships across the globe, collective liberation, the deepening of political education within my surrounding communities, a free Palestine.”
For Alsarraf, art is both a map and a movement— an ever-evolving dialogue between land, memory, and the urgent politics of belonging.