Through her most recent exhibition statement, Afaf captures her innermost values best, when she writes: "My life in art is a perpetual return to what resonates within me and what prompts me to open gates into unknown gardens: to plant and to weed, to prune and to cultivate, both senses and thoughts into a coherent, organic and complex whole. As I move forward I always return to what underlies my direct experience: a shaft of light. A memory of closeness. The feel of earth as I descend an old staircase. The wind. Riding a wave. Saying something ‘right’. Being a part. Forming a whole. I see my art as a garden without a fence. In the past I built fences that bound my return, my search, in time and in space. Today I feel my garden opening, becoming limitless and free, having been watered by endless journeys of exile and of communion; of love and of separation; of milk and of merging mirrors. I only wish that my garden is deep enough and expansive enough to contain you. For we are each other’s mirror. And our birth grows out of our joint reflection. My hope is that these reflections form the roots for more growth and more love. Despite all."
Books
To date, Afaf Zurayk has authored five books: 1. My Father. Reflections, published by Rimal Books in 2010, is an essay in photograph that tells a very personal tale. Yet in its scope, the essay moves beyond the particular to explore an understanding of a very complex relationship of a daughter with her father. The father, Constantin Zureiq, was a historian and a leading force in contemporary Arab thought. The daughter, Afaf, is an artist. Drawing on this most basic and formative relationship, Afaf examines visually, through images of light and shadow, the deep roots of bonding as well as the concept of time as it unfolds for a historian and for an artist. 2. lovesong, published by Rimal Books in 2011, is a portfolio of poems and paintings that unfold rhythmically to echo love as it moves forward and backward in time. 3. Drawn poems, published 2012, a collection of drawings printed and bound in an edition of 500 copies. 4. Return Journeys, a monograph published in 2019, documents Afaf’s creative journeys over the last several decades; journeys that traverse a wide range of media and themes, all united by a shared expression in visualizing what afaf calls, “the resounding sound of silence.” A collection of voices from colleagues, students, and friends who reflect on Afaf’s art, the publication stands testimony to the power of an art that speaks from the depths of the souls. Return Journeys Monograph was produced alongside its eponymous retrospective exhibition, held at Saleh Barakat Gallery in 2019. 5. Drawn By Light, published in 2019 by the American University of Beirut Press, represents a dialogue between image and word, and experience and thought. In this sequence of twenty pairs of images and texts spanning forty years of the artist's personal growth, it offers readers a rare view of the nature of expression. The intuitive choice of couplets and the way they flow reveal singular aspects of the creative process. The book invites readers on a journey aimed at understanding art through the transformative shift that comes from combining experience and thought, looking within while also observing from without.
