ATHIER

Dates of residency:  September till October  2015 
Born: 1982
Nationality: British/Iraqi
Lives and works: Paris, France
Education: 
2007 MA Communication Design with Illustration Central St. Martins (CSM)
Selected shows:
2020 Nothing is Certain, Everything is Melting, Ayyam Gallery, Dubai
2016 Fade and Float, Contemporary Art Platform (CAP), Kuwait City
2018 All Things Come Apart, Ayyam Gallery, Dubai
2016 2017 After Denudation, Ayyam Gallery, Beirut

THE ARTIST
Athier is a visual artist and educator whose work over recent years has centred on posing unanswerable questions against undefined answers and forming a visual narrative between the two. Since graduating from Central St. Martins, the subject of much of his work has been Iraq and his diasporic relationship to his intrinsic yet foreign homeland. Of the main constructs used within Athier’s paintings the initial response is that of scale and colour which guide the viewer through his compositions. Symbolism in these large scale paintings are weaved through layers of organic figurative and geometric Islamic forms. Large shapes frame moments of detail, acting like windows into another, very personal place, which the viewer is invited into. Although predominantly a painter, his more graphic drawing style uses similar devices of surrounding intense narrative with rigid forms. 

THE RESIDENCY
Athier communicates his diasporic experience as an Iraqi raised in London through his canvas, he describes his work as “an outsider’s but insider’s take on how to interact and understand the country”.  Traces of Iraq are embedded in Athier’s artwork, however, at BAR his subjects increasingly reflect his current environment, as he explains; “life comes through the decay which is really beautiful, so that’s visually one of the things that I was most inspired about in Beirut”. His current project conflates the flag and the skewer as a symbol of conquering, however he contests traditional notions of the flag by skewering tattered pieces of fabric from the streets of Beirut; “I wanted to try and skewer decay, and the idea that anything can be conquered by anything. There’s something very unimportant about what goes into the land, and something very unimportant about what the land is”.