Remnants is a solo exhibition by Syrian artist Kais Salman, on display until 18 March 2026, in which painting becomes a field for working with memory, broken images, and visual “shards” of the region’s recent history. Launched on 17 January at Ayyam Gallery in the Alserkal Avenue arts district, the show fits into the city’s winter art week alongside festivals and gallery shows.
In Remnants, Salman “places the viewer among ruins”: the works are constructed as a layer of forgotten images buried under decades of historical and media accumulation. The canvas becomes a space where memory is reassembled, a visual archive that has survived the collapse of previous narratives and attempts to rewrite them.
In Salman’s new works, fragments of faces and bodies, elements of interiors and symbolic details appear side by side, often faded or partially erased, like old photographs or frames from news footage. Over this sequence of images, powerful painterly gestures emerge: dense brushstrokes and bright patches of colour that at times mask and at times emphasise specific details, turning each painting into a struggle between what is visible and what has been suppressed.
For Salman, who was born in Syria and has long engaged with themes of violence, propaganda and mass imagery, the Remnants cycle continues his critical examination of how the media construct collective memory. Instead of direct scenes of war or protest, what we see here are consequences: traces, fragments, leftovers of visual noise that settle in the mind and shape what we call “history”.
Against the backdrop of festivals and fairs where light, easily readable imagery often dominates, Remnants offers a more complex, multilayered conversation about how art can work with trauma and memory without resorting to straightforward illustration. For viewers and professionals following the Middle Eastern scene, it is an opportunity to witness a new stage in the practice of one of Ayyam Gallery’s key artists and to see how painting remains a relevant medium in an era of endless image flow.
About the artist
Kais Salman (b. 1976, Tartous, Syria) is a leading figure of Syrian expressionism who lives and works in Syria. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus in 2002, where he studied under prominent Syrian artists, including Safwan Dahoul.
Working primarily in a monochromatic abstract-expressionist language, Salman uses satire as a critical tool to confront the normalisation of greed, narcissism, and ideological extremism. Through exaggerated and often unsettling imagery, he exposes a distorted world shaped by political corruption, consumerism, cosmetic obsession, imperialism, and the social mechanisms that sustain them.
To get more information about Remnants, please go to the exhibition’s official web page.
You might also be interested in visiting In the Space of Becoming by Alia Hussain Lootah.
