PRESENTATION: Vian Sora-Outerworlds

Vian Sora’s intensely autobiographical paintings are filled with emotional complexity and tension, bustling with a dynamic energy and struggle that reflect the artist’s personal journey to move beyond the collective trauma of violence and destruction that she experienced firsthand during decades of conflicts in Iraq. Sora’s painting process reflects this search for harmony and transcendence. While her canvases begin in a chaotic swirl of spray paint, acrylics and pigments covering the canvas, Sora wrests control creating specific forms and balance from the visual confusion.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Speed Art Museum Archive

Though Vian Sora’s paintings are largely abstract, upon closer inspection, they reveal half-hidden figures and suggest landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, cycles of life and death, yet infused with hope. Sora uses painting to directly confront the pain of her past and reimagine the cultural richness of her ancient homeland on canvas. The exhibition “Outerworlds” is a mid-career survey of Vian Sora, this exhibition presents a20 of Sora’s major works, charting her growth as an artist over a period of seven years, 2016 to 2023. The exhibition tell the story of how her multivalent paintings abstractly channel the tumultuous events of her life, ancient Mesopotamian history, Western art history, and Iraq’s diverse natural landscapes, including its deserts, rivers, and archeological sites.  Born in Baghdad, Sora had her first solo exhibition in Iraq in 2001. She lived through the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent Insurgency. She later left Iraq, sought refugee status for her family in the United Arab Emirates, and then eventually resettled in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2016, Sora turned to abstraction to process all that she had lived through from Iraq to the settlement in the United States. Her painting has transformed into a high- powered, bodily, and dynamic practice of controlled chaos. Her canvases reflect an array of radiant paints that are splashed, poured, and sprayed onto the canvas. Pigments run, accumulate, and clash, resulting in upwards of fifty layers of oil and acrylic paint in a single work. The title, “Outerworlds”, comes from two eponymous works included in the exhibition that Sora finished in 2021 while in Berlin on a residency. Vian completed this residency during a period of intermittent pandemic lockdowns, when she started to return to social spaces. The title is also a reminder that for all of her paintings’ interiority and feeling of completeness—as if there was an entire world laid down on the canvas—these paintings reference cycles of nature and human history. There is growth, decay, violence, healing, frenzy, and quiescence. “Morphing” (2023) and “Floodgates”(2021) both convey a generalized sense of transformation and change, while others, such as “Antibodies” (2020), reference the flagellum of viruses or cells. These poetic paintings not only reference their own process of making, or the chaos of war, but also are imbued with references to mythology, history, and the rich geography of Mesopotamia’s ancient Sumer, among the earliest of urban civilizations. These important resonances can be witnessed through Sora’s use of such poignant titles as “Abzu”, which is Sumerian for fresh water from underground aquifers that helped fertilize the region; “Hanging Gardens”, as in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; and Dilmun, an ancient civilization located along the shores of the Persian Gulf, but also a netherworld where the dead lived and Enki, a Sumerian god of water, dwelled. Consequently, Sora’s paintings contain traces of the civilizations and cultures, reflecting palimpsests that are part of Iraq’s millennia of recorded history as much as they are in the archeological sites across the country.

Photo: Vian Sora, Landscape with a Moth, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, Collection of Judson and Daphne Hartlage

Info: Curators: Tyler Blackwell, Owen Duffy and James Glisson, Speed Art Museum, 2035 South Third Street, Louisville, KY, USA, Duration: 10/10/2025-18/1/2026, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 10:00-17:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.speedmuseum.org/