Syrian(s) Biennale is an initiative that began in 2018, with support from the European Cultural Foundation for an initial research phase. It was first conceived as a mobile biennale responding to displacement: a cultural structure able to move with Syrian artistic life as it was forced across borders, legal statuses, languages, and political realities.

The project begins from a difficult question: what kind of Syrian cultural institution can be built when Syria itself has been fractured within, and between territory and exile, memory and erasure, return and impossibility, public life and inherited fear?

Following the political shift in Syria, the biennale has entered a new phase: the possibility of staging its inaugural edition in Damascus in 2027 while preserving its transnational logic. This opening is rare, fragile, and politically complex. It requires more than an exhibition. It requires a governance model, a curatorial framework, and a public methodology capable of holding contradiction without flattening it into a single national narrative.

For its first edition, the biennale’s theme will emerge from Syria’s current transformational moment and contribute to a much-needed public discourse on cultural reconstruction, memory, transitional justice, return, displacement, and the redefinition of public life. It will ask what art can do as a society renegotiates the meanings of belonging, responsibility, and collective imagination.

The working title Syrian(s) carries this tension. The parentheses mark the category's instability. “Syrian” is no longer a singular identity secured by geography or statehood. It names a plural and contested cultural condition shaped by survival, exiles, inheritance, rupture, and the unfinished work of justice.

The inaugural edition is being developed in dialogue with the Syrian Ministry of Culture, with Khaled Barakeh as founding director and co-curator. coculture is currently shaping the biennale’s governance, curatorial structure, and practical delivery model with attention to artistic independence, institutional accountability, and the realities of working in a fragile transitional context.

The curatorial process will be inclusive and dialogical, developed through an expanded council of expertise bringing together artists, curators, researchers, cultural workers, and civic actors with different relationships to Syria. Artists and projects will be selected through shared deliberation, clear criteria, and a curatorial framework capable of holding disagreement, plurality, and unresolved histories.

Alongside its presence in Syria, the biennale will explore cities with strong Syrian presence, including Beirut, Istanbul, Berlin, and others, as active nodes within a wider Syrian cultural geography. These are not satellites of a centre. They are part of the centre’s fracture.

The Syrian(s) Biennale aims to become a long-term platform for contemporary art, public memory, civic imagination, and cultural reconstruction. An international institution built to give them form, visibility, and responsibility.

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