Artist Interview: Layal Watfeh
Get to know the Toronto-based Syrian award-winning musician, voice actor, and composer Layal Watfeh
My name is Alya Ola Abbas, an architect and an artist researcher studying modern visual arts. Looking into international media art has led me to realize how important the role of art is in its power of reviving any community and giving a sense of confidence and a push for people to move forward, create and think differently. My story starts with the concept of our society’s struggle with accepting new ideas.
After graduating, and when I started working more and really experiencing the field of digital arts, I started to see how they create a sense of challenge in the viewer’s mind, whether they be an observer or an artist and, of course, this was all during the recession that we were living during the crisis. Everything around me in the city was down, broken, mundane and old. Even us, the young generation who was supposed to do his best, were in a state of slackness and loss; the best thing that we could do was to graduate from university.
All in all, the general atmosphere was suffocating and gray and the most annoying thing was how Syria was portrayed through global art scope. Syria was just a burnt down house in ruin. This is the truth, but only part of it. I decided to present my first solo multimedia art project, containing a video and a series of conceptual photos as well as two art installations, all of which portray the same concept and titled “Stereotype Inversion”.
The projects present two messages, an international one and a local one: the first message to international media is to stop constantly spreading this dark image of Syria and its psychological effect on us as Syrian youth, the second message was addressed to the Syrians themselves, “let’s stop copying, repeating and clinging on to the past. We want creativity and new ideas that represent us as Syrians and that would allow us to leave our mark internationally through a civilian-led movement.”
Get to know the Toronto-based Syrian award-winning musician, voice actor, and composer Layal Watfeh
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