With great pleasure, Madé van Krimpen presents the exhibition “Turning Notes”, featuring the works of the artists Raafat Ballan, Yara Saïd, and Mazen Al Ashkar.
The exhibition showcases the paintings of Raafat Ballan, whose work conveys powerful emotions and stories. In addition, the sound and video work of Yara Saïd and Mazen Al Ashkar are displayed, which harmoniously blend with the paintings.
The three artist friends have seamlessly merged different art disciplines, including painting, sound, and mixed media, to create a vibrant dialogue that celebrates memories, friendship, and creativity. All three artists studied at the University of Fine Arts in Damascus.
Raafat Ballen (1990, Syria) is a painter, based in Utrecht. “My art explores complex subjects, creating realistic yet strange images that capture a split second before emotion and judgment. I approach each piece without preconceptions, allowing the paint and brush to guide me. My smaller works focus on light and line, while larger canvases involve building up many layers to reveal the frailty of human life. My characters stand unaware of being seen, bursting out of my brush to convey my own impression of their story.”
Raafat Ballan’s art highlights social and political urgencies, aiming to combat desensitization to images of suffering. He studied painting at Damascus University before relocating to Lebanon, Turkey, and eventually the Netherlands. His portraits often depict family settings and intersect to create a larger body of work. Ballan’s style draws from both modern Western masters like Francis Bacon and Syrian diaspora artists like Marwan Kassab-Bachi.
Yara Saïd (1991, Syria) is a multidisciplinary artist, based in Amsterdam. She translates her environment through sound and explores daily encounters, identity politics, and aesthetics of representation. Yara values hospitality and is interested in documenting urban noise and researching emotional frequencies. She examines how sound can be used for both terror and liberation and offers a female perspective on global injustice.
Mazen Al Ashkar (1989, Syria) is a multidisciplinary artist who looks into physical and conceptual structures. His research involves paying attention to the sounds and shapes they produce; voices carrying words between the supernatural and the political, local pipelines streaming global vibrations, and frictions on the highway of industrial connectivity. Processing his material using rearrangement and repurposing among other means to create work that explores otherwise imaginative engagements between its elements.
