What Marwan’s Portraits Reveal About Change: Reflections on Marwan’s Soul in Exile Retrospective
By Mariam Tolba
“If we opened people up, we would find landscapes”
Agnes Varda
I first encountered Marwan’s work in the summer of 2023, when a friend invited me to the Kawkaba: Highlights from the Barjeel Art Foundation exhibition at Christie’s. I think I’ll forever remember pausing beneath Drei palästinensische Jungen (Three Palestinian Boys, 1970).
The three boys in the painting looked down from their position at the high edge of the wall, their faces weighed down by an objective seriousness. They seemed both boys and something more, as though they’ve been aged into tree rings or mountain slopes eroded by centuries of harsh weather. I often think about how the very elderly appear to transform, becoming more like ancient trees than humans.
When I was little my family would tease me for claiming I hated old people. It was a childish thing to claim, and I was a child, but I do remember feeling awkward in their presence, as if they were made of something completely different to myself. I grew older and began to recognize in my grandfather’s face a rooted witness to change, marked by time into a slower, enduring form of life that was actually different to my own. When he passed it was as if our family had lost the oldest tree in our forest, a pillar representing the 86 years he witnessed life on earth, no longer standing. The portrait of the young boys made me think of this now. Their faces were old.
Seeing Marwan’s Three Palestinian Boys broadened my understanding of portrait painting from what it previously had been- solely a means of memorializing one’s appearance in a particular moment. But I didn’t find Marwan’s paintings to be driven by this same motivation. His work famously resembles landscape painting in the sense that it is expansive and textured. The only indicators that you’re looking at a human figure are the abstract ridge of a nose, a forehead, the curve of a collarbone. You can’t quite put your finger on anything else.
As I consider the portraits now, several other thoughts emerge. A human face is never static. It is slowly and consistently weathered by time, furrowed by grief, and softened by love. Each experience is reflected as an expression that may eventually turn into wrinkled skin, much like rainfall carving new ridges into stone. And how often we consider stone to be the most solid, when in reality even the most enduring landscapes undergo change over time. Marwan’s portraits teach that the same applies to the human face, developing a kind of system for documenting change across lifetimes rather than merely aiming to capture a single moment
.Only in returning to a portrait I had once seen before could I feel how change has worked its way into my own life. In seeing the same thing twice I am confronted with how I see, how I move, how I come back to things I thought I already understood. His portraits seem to mirror this slow accumulation of experience and aging, with one layer of time forming over another, showing me a tenderness towards the process of change itself and a warm hug to those who experience it.
Perhaps this is why his portraits resonate with me. It is nice to feel a warm hug in the face of uncertainty. I am aware it is common to struggle with questions of belonging in today’s increasingly globalized world but I am always drawn to seeing feelings expressed exactly as I feel them, and his paintings do this for me.
My understanding of Marwan’s work deepened during my second encounter with his portraits at the more recent Soul in Exile retrospective at Christie’s. Having just returned to London after a year attempting to put down roots in my country of birth, I approached his paintings with a different gaze more informed by the transitions that took place in Marwan’s life as well as in my own. Perhaps only a kind of true knowing, the way one comes to understand their own land, allows for the recognition of similar features in the landscape of others. One who has experienced certain pains can recognize them in the wrinkles of another face.
For Marwan, the understanding of change began in childhood, after his mother’s death, when he began to acquaint himself with his father’s farmland. He had been taught to hunt, but instead, he walked its fields and learned its plants an animals, cultivating an intimacy with the land. Naturally, this bond intensified the pain of his eventual exile.
Once deprived of the land, his sense of belonging transformed from a physical connection to a more spiritual one. He described the act of painting faces again and again as a “growing hallucination,” akin to “the spinning of the Sufi dervish.”
Returning to his portraits in this same way, I consider the ways in which my life has changed since the last time I encountered his work. I’ve begun to face the questions that time and age have forced upon me, as the band-aid once lovingly placed to shield me from the world and its bureaucratic hurdles are being removed. Where in the world is the root of my emotional life, and why does it feel necessary that it be in a different location than my professional life? Where might I plant my own roots in order to combine the two, and how would this relate to the roots my family have nurtured before me?
Thinking about belonging in regards to location has always confused me. There is the Eastern Province of Saudi where I grew up, there is the Kuwait City I hear about, the Jeddah, the Cairo, the ancestral Hadramaut, El Minya in Egypt. And now there is the London I attempt to claim, in some way, for myself. I would much rather think in terms of the people I share my life with. In portraiture this process is made visible through careful observation of others. Marwan tells me it is enough just to observe, for now.
Marwan was called to continue his studies in Paris. History suggested that this was the path he should take as an Arab artist aspiring to grow, yet he was redirected to Berlin when The Suez crisis cut Syria’s ties with France. Fate intervened. A rock slipped from the cliffside, crashing into a river and altering its course. Pre-1989 Berlin was everything Marwan’s Damascus was not, standing in stark contrast to the city of his birth, where for centuries his family had been rooted. The rock had already fallen; he could only follow the river’s new course. Fate.
This notion of fate also brings me comfort. It is a reminder that to grow roots in any one place, one must linger long enough to read the terrain, to understand its many contours, seasons, and faces — until your roots might reach deep enough to match that knowing. At twenty-three, the faces around me continue to change: people move away, others enter, I move away, I enter other lives in the same way. The landscape itself is never still. Yet to see the human face through Marwan’s eyes is to collapse human intimacy into the natural world, to recognize that when the land of your comfort is distant, the human body itself can become a substitute site for belonging. We are able to belong to ourselves and to those chosen to be around us in the same way that one might belong to their country. I am comforted by the reminder that belonging is not a fixed point, but a process of accepting change as a layered accumulation of experiences that tie you to the earth. It is something we will continue to navigate and negotiate over time.
I think it is okay that I find myself clinging to faces, too. To love someone is to love their face, to know it so deeply that it begins to feel like familiar territory. It never belongs to you, but it is known by you.
I’d like to think of belonging as a kind of deep knowledge of terrain.
It is a privilege to know things, even if that knowledge is as simple as “the weather is cloudy today” or “I live in this building.” Knowing might be as close to ownership of our own lives as we can have. Faces change, just as landscapes shift. Life moves forward; it takes on new shapes. Yet beneath it all, something endures.
“What I want is to see your face in a tree, in the sun coming out, in the air.” - Rumi
This is great, Maryam!
So so so beautiful