Qais Al-Sindy (l) and Dagmar Painter stand in front of his paintings, (l-r) “Kiss From Heaven,”“My Cello..My Boat” and “Remnants of a Journey.” (STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY)

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2018, pp. 64-65

Music & Arts
The Jerusalem Fund Gallery in Washington, DC hosted a poignant and unusual opening reception for the Iraqi-born artist Qais Al-Sindy on Sept. 7, 2018. His 20 paintings were all the same size, 16x20 inches, but told 20 different stories of exile and displacement. Curator Dagmar Painter asked poets to give their own interpretations of each piece, and the result was a deeply moving live original poetry reading by Zeina Azzam, who read her own work as well as others. Then to top it all off, Fuod Foty accompanied the poetry readings with haunting notes from his oud. The result: the audience understood, using every sense, the deep inner feelings of people leaving home to journey into exile.

Al-Sindy’s journey began in Iraq, took him around the world, and may or may not end in America. Along the way he collected stretched 16x20 canvases as well as stories and dreams—his own and others. His expressionistic paintings depict exiles carrying burdens, souvenirs and tokens of lost loves, lives and homes.

His painting, “Bring the Moon with You,” inspired this poem by Azzam:

Bring the moon with you it is the only witness to our worn shoes, the faces we left behind.

Tether it to your arm and bring the moon with you, a lantern to light the river, the way to our stories.

—Delinda C. Hanley