Syrian artists fight for a ‘free space of creation’ post-Assad

DAMASCUS — Down a winding, stone-gray alleyway in Damascus’s ancient city center, a small door opens to a large, sunny atrium. Inside, nearly 200 Syrian artists gather: musicians, actors, dancers, singers and even a clown.

Seated under ornate archways and the enveloping branches of an orange tree, the group discusses the role of art in a newly liberated Syria. “We are trying to care for our culture,” Nora Mourad, an actress and the founder of the physical theater company Leish Troupe, tells the crowd. 

“There is a lack of trust between us and the new regime,” she continues, calling it her “duty as a citizen” to promote and protect the future of Syria’s art space.

In post-Assad Syria, many artists are experiencing a kind of artistic freedom they have never known. New galleries are opening, with artists displaying works banned or restricted under the former regime for the first time.

For decades, the Assad regime tightly controlled Damascus’s vibrant cultural hub, particularly concerned with art deemed even remotely political. Cultural events required complicated permissions and bypassing these procedures was dangerous. 

The artists’ gathering, held on February 6, was organised by Ettijahat, a Syrian cultural organization founded in exile. It was the first in-person event Ettijahat was able to organize in the Syrian capital in 13 years, Ettijahat’s director, Abdullah al-Kafri, told Syria Direct. “Today, merely a few months after the fall of the regime in Syria, the need for cultural and artistic entities is more crucial than ever,” he says.

Following a nearly two-hour discussion and a musical performance in the Damascus courtyard, the assembled artists mingled. Some had traveled from abroad, and others from distant parts of Syria. Many shook each others’ hands for the first time. 

Mourad, with a smile stretched across her face, embraced her friends and peers. She nodded, listening to their ideas for Syria’s art community. “I’m a Syrian citizen, I’m living a historical moment of change that I never dreamed of,” she told Syria Direct between conversations. 

Nora Mourad, an actress and the founder of the physical theater company Leish Troupe, mingles with friends and peers after a forum held in Damascus to discuss the role of art in a post-Assad Syria, 6/2/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

“I feel a huge responsibility, as someone who chose to stay here [in Syria] and work all these years,” she said. “My duty was to stay with the younger generation, to show them that art, during the war, could be a safe place to express, to heal, to dream. Today, the duty is much bigger and much more difficult, because when you deal with uncertainty, it’s scary.”

Where is the Ministry of Culture? 

Amid the celebration, apprehension lingered. Some artists were skeptical of Syria’s new authorities and were wary of how their policies might curb their creative freedoms. 

After Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and allied rebel groups, overthrew the Assad regime on December 8, they formed an interim government. The majority of the ministers appointed formerly held roles in the Syrian Salvation Government, the HTS-backed governing body that had ruled Syria’s northwestern Idlib province since 2017. 

Notably, the Salvation Government did not have a Ministry of Culture. Its most similar institution, the House of Culture and Knowledge, was part of the Department of Political Affairs. So far, a new Minister of Culture has not been appointed in Syria. 

In late January, rumours circulated in Syrian media that the former culture minister under Assad, Diala Barakat, had been reappointed to her position, but the interim government denied the news, saying there had been “no official decision.” 

Much of the conversation at the artists’ gathering in early February focused on reactivating the Ministry of Culture, which those gathered viewed as critical for supporting their work. “Activating the Ministry of Culture and enabling its work is an essential framework for ensuring a rich and diverse cultural life,” Ettijahat’s director, al-Kafri, said.

“The Minister of Culture herself, she’s in the building but they don’t give her any ability to work, really,” Mourad commented. 

On February 24, a day before the Syrian National Dialogue Conference—held to pave the way for a new constitution and form a new government—its preparatory committee held a separate session on arts and culture, inviting around 40 Syrian artists and actors to raise their concerns. 

The meeting was “fruitful,” Syrian director Rasha Sharbatji told the Syria TV channel in an interview, with many participants “raising questions, amid a clear desire from everyone to contribute to bringing about real change.”  

However, Mourad said that most of those invited were “TV stars and revolution icons living outside” the country, noting that she did not receive an invitation. “They [the new authorities] don’t understand the difference between culture and entertainment,” she contended. “There is a lack of trust—they don’t give us a chance to express our differences.” 

Ettijahat was also not part of the meeting, al-Kafri said. 

A member of the transitional government’s media office confirmed to Syria Direct on March 6 that a culture ministry has not been formed. A meeting would be held to discuss the topic, he added, though a date has not been set.

Oud musicians perform classical and traditional Arabic music at an artists’ forum in Damascus, 6/2/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

‘Deliberately marginalized’  

In the meantime, Mourad has been working to build connections between artists and other civil society actors to create a “free space of creation and expression without any kind of governmental pressure,” she said. 

“Critical links” between people—audiences and artists, and activists and civil society members—were fractured during more than 50 years of rule by Bashar al-Assad and his father, Mourad explained. “Our [theater] group didn’t agree with the last government, and most lived outside Syria. So it was really, really hard for us to meet, to plan programs and get people to come [to Syria],” she said. 

“Art was deliberately marginalized” under the Assads, Ahmad Darkhabani, a Syrian independent curator, wrote in a February 12 piece for al-Jumhuriya, an independent Syrian media outlet. “The regime directed its attention and resources toward easily controlled industries like media and entertainment, promoting narratives that aligned with its ideology, while commodifying and diminishing the role of art and artists,” Darkhabani said.

Despite Assad’s grasp, Mourad’s troupe still managed to perform. One of her favorite productions was from 2016, called “Survival.” In a video of the performance shared with Syria Direct, a group of four actors, all wearing white, stand onstage. One is blindfolded, another’s legs bound together by a white cloth. They bend and stretch in their bonds, spinning their arms and turning on the ground.

“We were talking about ourselves, Syrians inside Syria, the struggles we were facing, our little humors, our lives in the face of the world,” Mourad explained. 

“Nobody was really interested in getting to know what we were doing here, why we decided to stay,” she added. “Now is our chance to shine light on these artists who tried to somehow make some kind of theater or artistic movement during the war.” 

But living under an oppressive regime still weighed on the country’s artists. “The Assad regime left a stamp on our mentality and perspective, and our way of thinking. When you live your life under a dictatorship, there’s a little dictator in your body, a policeman who always talks to you,” Mourad said.

“Now, after two months [since the regime fell], I see how we’re recreating the same culture again, and again, and again. We need to learn from our mistakes, because if not, we will recreate them.” 

‘We just need good circumstances to rise’

Tameem Hamoud sat by candlelight in his one-room apartment in Damascus’s Old City on a cold February evening. A refrigerator, bed and couch took up much of the small space, its walls covered in paintings. Two statues the 34-year-old sculpted sat on a small table in the center of the room, illuminated by the candle’s soft glow.

Tameem Hamoud, 34, a Syrian artist and musician, lights a cigarette in his apartment in the Old City of Damascus, 6/2/2025 (Hanna Davis/Syria Direct)

Hamoud is an artist and musician, an electric and acoustic guitarist who performed in different Syrian metal bands between 2008 and 2017. Underground metal bands began to emerge in Syria in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when the Assad regime was not tolerant of the countercultural rock genre.

“They thought every one who listens to metal is considered a satan[ist],” Hamoud told Syria Direct. But when the 2011 uprising began, there were bigger problems to worry about. “No one gave a damn—so we exploded.” 

However, hosting concerts meant lengthy paperwork and approval procedures, and performances were sometimes interrupted by surprise guest appearances from Assad’s security forces, he recalled.

As the years drew on, Hamoud’s band members trickled out of the country, fleeing military conscription, arrest or crushing financial hardship.“There’s less of an art scene because there are no artists anymore, everybody left,” he said. 

Hamoud spent four years—from 2020 until the regime fell—without leaving his neighborhood, to avoid getting stopped at a checkpoint and forced into the military. “I travelled by foot every day for four years. I didn’t see my mom [living in the northern city of Homs]. This is another type of refugee,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the metal scene boomed abroad in places like Dubai, where Hamoud said many Syrian musicians fled.“That’s proof we are really quality people, we just need good circumstances to rise,” he said. 

“Syrian art is unique because it’s a gathering of cultures and ancient civilization,” Hamoud added. “To be Syrian is a really hard thing in this world, because everyone gets you wrong. We are all sophisticated people, we are lovely people, we want to live in peace.” 

Tameem Hammoud, 34, stands on the stage at Mustafa Ali Art Gallery in Damascus’s Old City, where his metal band last performed in 2017, 20/2/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

‘We can’t stop working’ 

Two days after the forum in the Old City, discussion of artists’ role in a new Syria continued at an art studio in the Jaramana suburb of Damascus, where four friends gathered around a small furnace, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes.

The friends—including two sculptors and a documentary filmmaker—had supported each other over the past 14 years of Assad’s oppressive rule and spiraling conflict. Now, they faced a new uncertainty together. 

“I’m not really afraid, yet, but it’s not that I have no fear at all,” Ronak Shukri Ahmad, a 40-year-old sculptor, told Syria Direct. “We don’t know what will happen, but we can’t stop working. This is our life, after all…[Art] is my language.” 

Ronak Shukri Ahmad, 40, sits behind one of her sculptures at a workshop in Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus, 11/12/2024 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

Ahmad has received international recognition for her sculptures, many of which encapsulate her personal experiences living under the regime and throughout conflict. However, she has also received threats stemming from aversions to depicting human forms in strict interpretations of Islam. She wondered how the new authorities, with their conservative Islamist values, would respond, noting that even at times her own mother would drape cloth over her statues to hide them from strangers’ gaze. 

She brought out a few of her works. In one bronze statue, a blind, bony child clings to the arm of an older figure who leads the child, mouth agape as if in a scream. “Following leaders blindly, something you can see in society,” Ahmad explained. “Their bones protrude because we are fragile.” 

Another piece depicts a metallic, nude woman cradling her own disembodied head in her arms. Ahmad sculpted it at a time when she nearly “lost herself” and wanted to protect her “heart and mind,” she said. 

Her other works include a set of women’s heads, their faces filled with sorrow.  “They are mothers after being displaced from Afrin,” a Kurdish-majority part of northern Syria, she said. Ahmad is Kurdish, and her parents are from Afrin, where a Turkish-backed opposition offensive in 2018 displaced more than 300,000 people, most of them Kurds.

Ronak Shukri Ahmad’s statues of female heads, which she says reflect the emotions of mothers displaced from Afrin, 11/12/2024  (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

“Ronak [Ahmad] loves to collect people, her place was a safe place for all Syrians,” 24-year-old Soha Ezzi, a documentary filmmaker, said, peering over at her friend. For years, Ahmad’s home in Jaramana was something of a refuge, a space to gather, share ideas and escape from the violence outside its walls. 

Ezzi is a fourth-year student at Damascus’s Cinema Institute, where the students’ films were censored heavily under Assad. “The first film I made [to be shown], was refused because of its political message,” Ezzi told Syria Direct. 

The documentary, filmed in 2024, depicted the daily struggles of people in her hometown, Syria’s Druze-majority southern city of Suwayda. One man she interviewed there said “we need democracy if we want to make art,” she recalled—a line the former regime could not accept. 

Now, Ezzi is remaking the film, hopeful that this time it will not be censored. But she, like her friends at the studio, still worries films could face a different type of pressure under the new administration. “Our concern is that we’ll face this ‘one type’ or ‘one color’ policy, where they’ll form a committee related to artwork, focused on [upholding] morals,” she said. 

Sculptor Momtaz Shoaib, 48, poses for a photo with one of his favorite works at his exhibition in the Blue House Gallery in Damascus’s Old City, 8/2/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

‘We want to establish our presence’ 

Across the table from Ezzie, Momtaz Shoaib, 48, said he had decided to test the waters, and display his sculptures in a gallery. “The situation [after the regime’s fall] pushed me to assert that we are here. We want to establish our presence before any other force tries to take this away from us,” he told Syria Direct. 

Shoaib, a stoic man with a stern but gentle face, said the exhibition was “bold”, but “by taking this step, which involves a level of risk, it could open the way for other [artists].” So far, the exhibition has not received any negative reaction from the society or new authorities, the gallery’s manager, Samer Aleid, told Syria Direct. 

Later that day, Shoaib greeted guests at his exhibition, which opened at the start of February and displayed over 30 of his works. The sculptures capture more emotions than Shoaib’s reserved demeanor let on. In one, a woman floats above her lover, almost blown away by an unseen wind. 

Shoaib walked over to one of his works, noting it was one of his favorites. He completed it at the end of last year, around the same time the regime fell. It depicts a man holding a goat above his shoulders, the head of the animal morphing into the head of the man. “It somewhat resembles us, in this place,” Shoaib said, leaving the rest of the interpretation up to the viewer. 

“We want the world outside to see us, so they don’t misunderstand this place and the individuals in it,” he added.