Wind Witness

Born in Homs, Syria, in 1976, Fares Cachoux studied computer engineering at the University of Aleppo, before doing his master's and doctorate in digital art and visual communication in Paris. After a ten-year stint in the Gulf, where he worked for various museums, he decided to dedicate himself definitively to art and settled back in France in 2021.

Cachoux's works tell stories using a visual vocabulary reduced to the essentials. From the war in Syria to those drowned in the Mediterranean, from the complexity of social customs in the Gulf to political caricatures, from the fragility of our democratic societies to the depletion of our environmental resources, each of his works is the reduction of an event, a situation, to its very quintessence.

A committed artist, he knows how to reach a very wide audience with simple, transparent messages. As he puts it, ‘That's where the enigma lies! You have to summarise complex events with a minimum of elements, without losing the meaning’. With a bold, minimalist style, bright colours and simple silhouettes, Cachoux puts his work at the service of freedom and human dignity.

Cachoux held his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2015, after being invited by Banksy to take part in the Dismaland exhibition (UK). Today, his work is regularly published in French and foreign newspapers such as Le Monde, Le Temps, Courrier International and the Huffington Post. His work also features in the French school curriculum and is used to teach children how to decipher political posters.

Born in 1946 in Lebanon, Choukini has lived and worked in France for many years. He trained at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1967 to 1972. In 1984, he enriched this initial training with a trip to Japan, which left a lasting impression on him both technically and in terms of form and surface. The discovery of new tools and traditional Japanese techniques allowed him to achieve results that were very different from those he had obtained until then.

He taught sculpture at the Lebanese University in Tripoli from 1985 to 1987, and then at Yarmouk University in Jordan from 1989 to 1991.

Chaouki Choukini's sculptures, whether in wood (his favored material) or in bronze, reflect a distinctive aesthetic where abstraction often gives way to dreamlike details that evoke, if not the real world, at least a more tangible one. The surfaces play on contrasts between very smooth, polished areas and more dynamic or rugged details. The balance between solid and empty spaces is masterfully controlled, and the whole conveys a sense of great delicacy, even poetry.

Chaouki Choukini was awarded the Young Sculpture Prize in 1978, the Taylor Foundation Prize in 2010, and in 2015, the Académie des Beaux-Arts presented him with the Pierre Gianadda Sculpture Prize for his body of work. His works are held in public collections in France, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Born in Syria in 1956, Laila Muraywid graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She has lived and worked in Paris since 1981. A sculptor, draftsman, and photographer, she has also created numerous jewelry collections for various performances (Musée Galliera, Institut du Monde Arabe, Shoman Foundation) as well as for Haute Couture houses such as Jean-Louis Scherrer, Christian Lacroix, and Torrente. Muraywid's rich and prolific body of work is inseparable from the figure of women, their place in society, their freedom of expression, and their emancipation.

Equally comfortable across all mediums she employs, Muraywid unfolds a universe as personal as it is cohesive, where nature and its metamorphoses, the rhythm of time and human finitude, violence, and the sublime all find their place in turn.

Muraywid's work is featured in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, the Musée Galliera, the Institut du Monde Arabe, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Jordan, the Claude & France Lemand-IMA Fund, the Ministry of Culture in Damascus, the Al Mansouria Foundation, the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation, the Atassi Foundation, the Museum of Lace and Embroidery in Caudry, as well as in many private collections worldwide.

Yasmina Alexandra Nysten (b. Helsinki, raised Beirut) is a Finnish-Lebanese artist working in Oregon whose practice bridges figurative realism and atmospheric abstraction. She holds a BFA from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) and an MFA from Pratt Institute.

Initially centered on large-scale figurative works, Nysten’s practice evolved during her tenure in New York to address built environments, institutional visibility, and cultural memory. Her work negotiates the space between Middle Eastern and Western figurative traditions.

Currently working along the Pacific Coast in Oregon, her body of work reclaims portraiture as a structural field where internal topography, ancestral trace, and physical landscape collapse into one another. 

Born in Chicago in 1934, Irving Petlin was admitted at the age of 17 to the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 1950s, he became the youngest member of the Monster Roster, a group of artists who rejected dominant abstraction and continued to give a prominent place to figuration. He first stayed in Paris between 1959 and 1963, where he reunited with other American artists, including Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. He participated in numerous exhibitions at the Galerie du Dragon and became an active member of the Parisian art scene, associating with Jean Hélion, Alberto Giacometti, Balthus, Max Ernst, and Roberto Matta. He then moved to New York, where he lived for over twenty years, before permanently returning to Paris in 1990. Uncomfortable with rigid borders, he regularly returned to the United States, to his house on Martha’s Vineyard, where he painted during the summer.

A remarkable painter and pastelist, and a great admirer of Odilon Redon, Petlin developed a unique style somewhere between dreamlike expression and surrealism, using vibrant colors to portray a deeply personal universe. Petlin often worked in series, developing major cycles inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, Odilon Redon, Primo Levi, Bruno Schulz, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. Beyond these intellectual affinities, Petlin always remained attuned to the surrounding world, cultivating a “responsible aesthetic” that denounced war (in Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria), violence (both that of World War II camps—where the artist of Polish-Jewish origin lost part of his family—and that inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza), racial injustice, modern-day slavery, and more. In a 1964 text for the Galerie du Dragon, Édouard Glissant placed Petlin in the lineage of Goya and Géricault, among the “outraged commentators” of history.

His work is held in over 30 museums and in numerous private collections.

Khaled Takreti, born in Beirut in 1964, is a Syrian artist renowned for his innovative approach to portraiture. Originally trained as an architect at the University of Damascus, he began exhibiting his artwork in the mid-1990s. Takreti's paintings often blend personal narratives with explorations of modern social themes, characterized by a Pop aesthetic that has influenced a subsequent generation of contemporary Arab painters. His large-scale compositions delve into the psychology of his subjects, merging portraiture with a refined sense of design. Since relocating to Paris in 2004, Takreti has exhibited internationally, with works housed in institutions such as the Syrian National Museum, the Jordanian National Gallery of Fine Arts, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha.

A multidisciplinary visual artist, she draws on her personal journey across borders and cultures to weave a visual language that explores memory, the body and space. A graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus (Syria) in 2000, she worked as a jewellery designer until 2010, before leaving Syria in 2012 as a result of the war, and settling in France in 2015. She subsequently obtained a Master’s degree from the École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre–Rouen (ESADHaR) in 2022.

Her work explores questions that are both personal and collective, relating to the transformations of memory between past and present – themes that lie at the heart of our contemporary existence and our daily lives, on human, social and political levels alike. Her work oscillates between absence and presence, within temporal and geographical contexts that are in a state of perpetual flux, exploring the relationship between the body, matter and space. She has gradually developed a cross-disciplinary approach, incorporating painting, sculpture, installation and performance.
Her practice examines the dialogue between materials, gestures and creative contexts, drawing on organic or raw materials that carry her personal or collective memory. Through her projects, she addresses the tensions experienced by displaced bodies, emotional archives and fragmented memories, conceiving the body as a territory in a constant shift between disappearance and persistence, interwoven with narratives that are both personal and collective.