Muna Al Fadl is a New York City-based artist primarily focusing on the destruction, reconstruction, and fragmentation of memory and space within the Damascus cityscape. Al Fadl’s work overlaps architectural elements, portraiture, image transfer, and appropriated images from Google Earth in an interrogation of diasporic nostalgia in a post-war landscape. With the works primarily painted in stain on found wood, the physical basis establishes a conversation around post-war reconstruction and cautious nostalgia.

Through the iconic Umayyad architecture, Al Fadl enters the collective and nationalistic memory of a disjointed nation, fracturing the architecture and thus separating structures from their original context. Arabic marquetry is a consistent muse of Al Fadl; the classic Damascene woodworking patterns flood the work while the handling of the paint references veneering itself. Unnatural lighting, fragmented archways, image transfer, and pattern reinforce the city’s urgent, historical, and unknown. Al Fadl’s work is an ode to an uncharted home, a response to the fall of tyranny, and a poem to the resilience of Damascus.

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