Press & Media Below are selected articles and media features covering Sahar Zuher’s work in the Middle East. Most of these pieces originally appeared in Arabic. English summaries are provided for international readers.
Kan Ya Ma Kan / Once Upon a Time.
The Gallery, Baghdad — 2025
The Sultan’s Shirts, Embroidered with Roxelana’s Tears
In this series, Sahar Zoheir presents robes inspired by traditional garments worn by Eastern rulers and warriors. The idea stems from a true story of Roxelana, wife of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who once wrote him a letter filled with love and sorrow while he was on the battlefield. The Sultan kept the letter close to his heart in his war robe, where its words mixed with the dust and blood of war.
Through golden calligraphy, Islamic motifs, and her own illustrations, Zoheir transforms this historic moment into a poetic reflection on today’s world—one plagued by conflict yet yearning for love and peaceful coexistence.
Iraqi-born artist Sahar Zuhair, now based in Brussels, transforms personal and collective memory into visual poetry. Inspired by her mother’s letters to her father during the eight-year war—letters carried close to his heart amid dirt, sweat, and blood—her work fuses love, loss, and the resilience of those in exile. Using Japanese Lokta paper, ink, coffee, Islamic patterns, and Arabic calligraphy, she reimagines fragments of Iraq’s past. The exhibition blends printmaking, installation, and video to evoke a war-torn childhood: paper kites crying in the wind, bicycles searching for safe streets, and laughter shadowed by the roar of planes. It stands as both a condemnation of violence and a celebration of love’s power to keep us alive.
Sahar Zuher is an exiled contemporary artist known for her distinctive approach to graphic art, installation, and video. Her solo exhibition “Kan Ya Ma Kan” blends technology, design, drawing, color, calligraphy, and ornamentation to create immersive visual experiences.
Her work is deeply rooted in human and social issues, reimagining life and reality through symbolic forms, minimal shapes, and layered textures. She combines printing techniques, handmade colors, and mixed materials with three-dimensional installations, reflecting a postmodern sensibility that embraces diversity, balance, and cultural heritage.
Through formal and chromatic reduction, she distills ideas into powerful, concise visual statements that convey human suffering, resilience, and psychological depth. Exhibited widely in Iraq and internationally, her art seeks to engage the viewer in an active dialogue—bridging beauty, thought, and critical awareness.
In her exhibition Kan Ya Ma Kan at The Gallery, graphic artist Sahar Zuher creates an emotional space where memory, exile, and heritage intertwine. Working with aged papers, handwritten letters, fabric, and metallic charms from Iraqi tradition, she weaves together the longing of a life in exile with the tactile presence of home.
Her works combine traditional printmaking techniques with manual aging processes, layering old and new materials to evoke both fragility and resilience. Hanging booklets, textured surfaces, and mythological motifs draw the viewer into stories of displacement, dictatorship, and survival during Iraq’s turbulent years.
The exhibition bridges the artist’s current life in the West and her roots in Iraq, using graphic precision and heartfelt spontaneity. Subtle Sufi sounds enrich the atmosphere, turning the viewing into a sensory experience. Through her integration of personal memories—like her father’s shirt kept safe through fear—and collective Iraqi history, Zuhair preserves cultural memory while giving it new visual life.
Nibras Hashim praises the show as a rare example of a fully integrated graphic art installation, balancing technique, emotion, and storytelling with honesty and depth.
Rahim Youssef – April 2025
In her exhibition Kan Ya Ma Kan, graphic artist Sahar Zuher transforms memory, longing, and exile into tangible form. Using aged papers, hand-antiqued textures, mythological Iraqi symbols, and echoes of personal letters, she bridges her life in exile with the homeland she still carries within. The works blend printing, collage, and installation—suspended papers, layered surfaces, and intimate booklets—evoking both the fragility and resilience of memory. Viewers encounter faces marked by fear and endurance, relics of a generation shaped by dictatorship, war, and displacement. Through thoughtful craftsmanship and symbolic depth, Zuhair preserves the essence of her roots while engaging universal themes of loss, identity, and belonging.
The halls of The Gallery in Baghdad were adorned with over fifty artworks by expat artist Sahar Zuhair in her new solo exhibition, Once Upon a Time. Sahar combined folkloric materials—such as paper scraps, colorful beads, and family letters—with contemporary graphic and printmaking techniques, including screen printing, to create works that carry a deep popular spirit.
The exhibition tells the story of a fighter carrying love letters torn by war but still fragrant with jasmine. Words protected him amid battles, symbolizing the power of love to withstand war and destruction.
This work won Sahar Zuher first prize at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, earning her a solo exhibition scheduled for late 2023. The installation includes five shirts accompanied by long letters, art journals, and framed pieces of various sizes and uses multiple printing techniques on treated Japanese Lokta paper to evoke a sense of the past.
