What remains of home after years of movement?
Venus Johara is a Syrian painter born in Damascus, raised across different cities in the Gulf, and later immigrating to the Netherlands. Her work explores memory, displacement, and the meaning of home.
After being forced to leave the life she had built, Johara moved repeatedly and lived alone in refugee camps, carrying her life through temporary rooms, borders, and uncertainty. Over time, home stopped existing as a fixed place and began living instead through memory, ritual, relationships, and sensation.
Beginning from personal family photographs, the work traces intimacy and longing through shared meals, music drifting through rooms, overlapping conversations, and gestures repeated so often they became acts of care.
Working on unstretched canvas, the paintings remain flexible and unsettled, resisting permanence, fixed form, and borders.
Through these works, Johara reconstructs the feeling of home through the fragments that remain despite distance and displacement.