Esraa Dayrwan was born in Damascus in 1990 – at a time of profound contradictions: growing up in the shadow of a socialist regime, witnessing the collapse of state order and the rise of extremist structures. Her childhood and youth were marked by a changing world, whose fault lines would later find their way into her artistic practice.

In her art, Dayrwan weaves these biographical breaks into multi-layered visual worlds that poetically negotiate memory, trauma and identity. Her photographic stagings and collages transform fleeting inner states into visible spaces – places where the personal and the political intertwine. The city, the body, the family – everything becomes a fragment and a trace, everything tells of loss and survival, of the search for belonging in uncertainty.