Fig. 1. Leila Nseir, Untitled, Mixed Media on Carton, 37 x 27 cm, Undated
The eyes dominate Leila Nseir’s undated Untitled, a small work in mixed media on carton held by the Atassi Foundation (fig. 1). Ringed in black and enlarged beyond ordinary anatomical proportion, they face directly forwards while seeming to lift slightly above the viewer’s own line of sight. Pale blue irises are contained within broad whites. Beneath them, rose, yellow and violet pass unevenly across the cheeks, where the medium has been rubbed and scored, then laid down in broken deposits. A row of yellow discs crosses the brow. The blue field at either side offers no depth into which the head might withdraw. Face and ground meet at an emphatic contour, and the eyes hold the viewer before the surface.[1]
Fig. 2. Ahlam al-Turk, “Leila Nseir: My Face is a Mirror of Your Faces” interview, 8 April 2008, publication unidentified
Nseir’s abraded, high-keyed surfaces invite an expressionist reading, in which a worked face registers private feeling. This gaze does not primarily solicit such a reading. It runs outwards, in terms supplied by a 2008 interview with Nseir, which carried the headline “My Face is a Mirror of Your Faces”[2] (fig. 2). The singular “my face” opens at once onto the plural “your faces”: the possessive shifts from the individual artist to a collective addressee. The face is hers, but its work is not confined to her. A second Untitled in the same collection, catalogued in the same medium and dimensions, repeats the frontal axis and enlarged eye, indicating that Nseir was constructing a facial type rather than recording a single likeness.[3] That type is collective not because it addresses the viewer, as frontal portraiture conventionally does, but because it returns the look without settling into the identity of either artist or sitter. The face that could belong to anyone becomes available to everyone.
Nseir’s frontal face was formed abroad. Its structure comes from her training in Cairo, and from her own account of ancient Egyptian relief. Once established, however, it entered into dialogue with a deeper regional history of frontal, memory-bearing images, including funerary portraiture from Egypt and Syria. The resulting face is neither an archaeological quotation nor a nationalist emblem restored from the past. It is a modern memory-bearing form — votive only in the limited sense set out below — built from the lessons of Egyptian art and redirected towards the labouring women and the casualties of violence who populated Nseir’s practice. The question, then, is how Nseir built a form capable of carrying this address. The first answer lies in Cairo.
Cairo and the construction of the face
Nseir entered the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1959 on a scholarship from the United Arab Republic. Hussein Bicar taught her there and became an important mentor. Nseir had originally hoped to study sculpture, although Bicar and her other instructors directed her towards oil painting.[4] She nevertheless retained a sculptural conception of the figure. Modern Egyptian sculpture also mattered to her, especially the work of Mahmoud Mokhtar, whose practice demonstrated how ancient formal principles might enter modern art without being reproduced as historical pastiche.[5]
The most secure evidence for the effect of this formation comes from Nseir herself. In a 1996 interview with Saleh Diab, she described ancient Egyptian art as the source of her understanding of line. She admired in it “modernity, delicacy and solidity together”, as well as an extraordinary simplification of form. She associated the beauty of the mass with poetry and stated plainly that her contact with Egyptian civilisation had left visible marks upon her art. Line became her primary means of expression, although she insisted that it required the coloured field to complete the work.[6] These remarks identify formal principles rather than a repertory of motifs. The lesson was not to imitate the profile pose or reproduce the conventions of pharaonic art. It was to understand how reduction could lend the body weight, and how a bounding line could organise a figure without modelling every anatomical transition. In Nseir’s frontal heads, the contour does not merely describe an exterior edge. It divides the facial plane and holds its coloured passages within a compact structure. Even when the surface is abraded, the head retains the stability of a constructed mass.
Cairo is therefore not a biographical prelude to an essentially Syrian career. It supplied the formal grammar through which the later works became possible. Ancient Egyptian art was formative, on Nseir’s own account. Mokhtar belongs to this attested Egyptian field, although the evidence warrants the more exact claim that his example interested her rather than that a particular work directly influenced her. Fayum, Palmyra and the Syrian icon occupy a different evidentiary category. They can situate the face historically, but they cannot be made into sources that Nseir herself named. Cairo gave the face its architecture. The enlarged eye determines what that architecture does.[7]
The eye and the memory-bearing portrait
In Untitled, the two eyes remain unusually legible amid the face’s fractured colour. The cheeks are unevenly worked, and the mouth is split by the vertical division descending from the nose. The eyes, by contrast, retain firm symmetry. Their black surrounds give them greater visual stability than the other features, while the blue irises establish a chromatic relation with the ground. The head appears materially worn yet optically alert. Its surface bears damage without surrendering its capacity to look.
This claim must remain limited to a particular strand of Nseir’s work. The archive also preserves monotypes and graphic heads in which the features seem trapped within dark, fibrous surfaces. Those faces are frequently mask-like and inwardly compressed. The fixed, enlarged eye belongs more specifically to the frontal colour heads. Acknowledging this difference prevents one formal device from being made to explain an entire practice that Nseir herself pursued through changing media and pictorial languages. Nagham Hodaifa’s account of Syrian portraiture places that wide eye within a Syrian lineage. She describes Nseir’s faces as generally turned towards the viewer and marked by wide eyes. Hodaifa reads their features as arising from the personal rather than the collective self, but Nseir’s phrase “My Face is a Mirror of Your Faces” unsettles that separation. The phrase instead proposes that the personal face can become the medium through which a wider body recognises itself.[8]
Hodaifa’s broader history situates Syrian portraiture within a long regional concern with absence and commemoration. Fayum mummy portraits direct their gaze towards the living while accompanying the dead. Palmyrene funerary busts place the represented person at the threshold of the tomb, often preserving a name alongside the face. In both cases, frontality makes the portrait a carrier of memory: the body is absent, but the image remains available for encounter. The face outlasts the person.[9]
Nseir’s heads can be situated within this history without being derived from it. What they share is a task. The frontal face keeps the represented figure present by sustaining an address beyond the duration of the body. In Nseir’s work, however, the portrait is detached from the memorial identity of a named deceased person. The face is usually untitled and frequently undated. It preserves presence while refusing to specify whose presence is being preserved. This indeterminacy is what permits the single face to become collective.
The same logic reaches the Syrian icon. Hodaifa identifies the wide eyes, compressed features and frontal presentation characteristic of the Syrian icon tradition, but she does not establish that tradition as a source for Nseir. Her more explicit connection is to Elias Zayat, whose scholarship and painting engaged directly with Syrian iconography. To place Nseir’s head in dialogue with the icon is therefore an interpretive extension. The relation lies in the work of frontality. Presence is produced not through the illusion of a body occupying space, but through the face’s unbroken orientation towards the beholder.[10] The enlarged eye introduces a further resemblance to the votive image of ancient Syria and Mesopotamia. Here too, the comparison should not be mistaken for an attested influence. Hodaifa’s regional history begins with the Eye Idols excavated at Tell Brak, whose bodies are reduced so that the eyes carry almost the entire force of the figure. She describes the open eye as a sign of continued life and presence. Nseir’s head can be read against that votive condition. Its eye is too large to function as neutral anatomical description. It stays permanently open, permanently awake. What the comparison isolates is therefore not a borrowed dedicatory function but an analogous optical charge: the open eye as a sign of presence, retained after the figure’s cultic function has fallen away.[11]
The discs across the brow intensify the separation of the head from observed portraiture. They may resemble ornaments or a crown, but the work provides no basis for identifying them as a specific historical attribute. Their function is pictorial. They mark the upper limit of the face and give the head a ceremonial bearing without assigning it to a recoverable person or period. Together with the contour and forward gaze, they make the figure appear less like a sitter encountered at one moment than a type designed to endure.
“My Face is a Mirror of Your Faces” names the consequence of this construction. The mirror describes the direction of the encounter. The face receives looking and sends it back. The abraded cheek and the hard black contour keep that exchange physical rather than notional: the surface shows its own making even as it holds the gaze. What begins as the artist’s face becomes plural because no single biography can exhaust the position it occupies. When this isolated head gives way to Nseir’s populated compositions, the face that returned one viewer’s look becomes a body among many.
The registered body and the collective woman
In Fertility (1994), Nseir divides the pictorial field into registers[12] (fig. 3). Beneath the recumbent form that occupies the upper zone, a row of upright figures is compressed into a shallow lateral band. Bodies overlap without receding into continuous perspectival space; their repeated contours produce accumulation rather than depth. The composition proceeds across the sheet, so that the individual body becomes legible only through its position within the group.
Nour Asalia, drawing upon the recollections of the critic Saad al-Qasim, connects Nseir’s registered compositions to cylinder seals and wall reliefs associated with Mesopotamia, Mari and Ugarit. The attribution matters. This ancient Syrian and Mesopotamian register is not documented in Nseir’s testimony with the same specificity as her account of Egyptian art. It is al-Qasim’s reading of her withdrawal from conventional perspective and her arrangement of figures in rows. The comparison is persuasive because it describes a compositional operation visible in the works, but it should remain attached to the critic who proposed it.[13]
The registered composition performs a task distinct from that of the eye. The frontal eye binds a face to its viewer — and because that face is no one in particular, the binding is endlessly repeatable rather than private. The frieze places bodies in relation to one another. In works of war and of maternal labour, Nseir repeatedly builds meaning through this accumulation. The Martyr (The Nation) of 1978 makes the political operation explicit in its title. The represented body is at once a particular casualty and the figure of a national collective. Yet the body does not disappear into an immaculate allegory. It remains subject to violence.[14]
The same complication governs Nseir’s maternal figures. Asalia, citing Salwa al-Zein’s 1985 interview, notes that Nseir retained the conventional image of the virgin or mother as a representation of the nation. Nseir did not simply reject an inherited female type. She altered the conditions under which it could carry collective meaning. Her women bend under labour, endure pregnancy or appear within scenes of bereavement. The female body signifies the nation, but it is not smoothed into an abstract emblem of continuity. Its exposure to exhaustion and injury remains visible.[15] This is the feminist force of Nseir’s collective figure. The woman does not gain political significance by ceasing to be embodied. Instead, the bodily cost of national and social history becomes the substance of the image. The nationalist convention that turns the female body into an emblem of territorial continuity is turned against itself: the allegorical body is made to register what the emblem usually conceals.[16] Nseir’s own conviction that an artist belongs to an era, a class and a nation helps explain why these figures cannot be reduced to private symbolism. Their bodies are where social and national history becomes materially legible.[17]
Fig. 4a. Arab Woman and Art Creativity [al-Mar’a al-ʿArabiyya wa-I-Ibdā ʿal-Fannī], exhibition programme/invitation, Damascus, 1975
Fig. 4b. Exhibition invitation featuring Leila Nseir, Asma Fayoumi, Greta Alwani and Shalabiya Ibrahim, Damascus, 1984
The archive also prevents this position from being presented as the achievement of an isolated female pioneer. It records Nseir’s participation in Arab Woman and Art Creativity, organised in Damascus in 1975 (fig. 4a), and in a 1984 exhibition with Asma Fayoumi, Greta Alwani and Shalabiya Ibrahim (fig. 4b). These events do not prove that the participating artists shared a single feminist programme. They establish a more defensible point: Nseir worked within an identifiable formation of women who exhibited together and contributed to the public account of Syrian art. In 1996, she also published a study of women’s contributions to Syrian visual art in connection with an exhibition in Amman.[18]
The face and the frieze are therefore two scales of the same proposition. The single face becomes collective by returning the viewer’s gaze. The registered composition makes collectivity visible through the adjacency of bodies. That movement between singular voice and plural address also structured Nseir’s writing.
Fig. 5. Suhayl Khalil, “Leila Nseir Reads Her Artistic Experience: An Artist Who Paints in Rhymes and a Poet Who Writes in Colours”, interview, publication and date unidentified
One Syrian press profile joined Nseir’s literary and visual work in its headline, describing her as “an artist who paints in rhymes and a poet who writes in colours”[19] (fig. 5). The language could be dismissed as journalistic ornament were it not supported by Nseir’s own practice. Her poems appeared beside reproductions of her art, while her archive preserves The Notebook of Poetry and Sculpture, completed between 1969 and 1972. Its pages hold poems and prose alongside designs for sculptures that do not illustrate the writing but pursue a parallel investigation of mass and surface.[20] Asked what a poem could accomplish that a painting could not, Nseir replied that “the poem is a vast collection of canvases”. The remark reverses the expected relation between the arts. Poetry does not explain a picture. It multiplies pictorial spaces. The sculptural sketches in the notebook similarly preserve the ambition that had been redirected during her Cairo training. The black contour of her painted and printed figures can consequently be understood as more than graphic description. It behaves as a cut: it presses into the surface and constructs the body through division.[21]
“My Face is a Mirror of Your Faces” is the point at which word and image coincide most completely. The sentence begins in an individual voice and opens into a plural form. The frontal head conducts the same movement visually. Neither medium supplements the other. Both transform a singular utterance into collective address. Because language and image belonged to one practice, the conditions under which their evidence survived are not incidental to Nseir’s history. They determine what can now be known about it.
The archive as argument
Nseir’s archive is not merely the repository from which her career can be reconstructed. Its own history supplies evidence of the precariousness of that career. From 2016, Nseir and the artist Ahmad Kasha began sorting the documents she had retained. In 2019, while she was in hospital, the contents of her Damascus studio were packed into rubbish bags after her landlord entered the property. Kasha and Siba al-Ali intervened before the material was discarded. Kasha subsequently gathered broadcast interviews, conducted more than one hundred hours of recordings with Nseir and scanned works held in Syrian collections. He transferred a digital copy to the Atassi Foundation.[22]
Fig. 6. Leila Nseir, Creatures, exhibition invitation, Mark Hachem Gallery, Beirut, 20 March - 2 April 2015
MASA received nearly seven hundred documents, of which 478 were included in the initial public release. They encompass press material, photographs, exhibition records and Nseir’s writings. The archive remains incomplete: further letters and exhibition documents are still in Syria, while some recordings have yet to be processed. Its publication was originally intended to occur during Nseir’s lifetime, but she died before the project was released.[23] This history complicates the familiar language of the neglected woman artist. Nseir was not absent from public culture. She exhibited repeatedly and was discussed at length in the Syrian press. What remained vulnerable was the documentary framework capable of connecting those appearances. The archive reveals the difference between visibility and historical security. A career may be publicly recognised yet remain difficult to narrate when its records are scattered and uncatalogued, surviving only through private acts of preservation. Reassembling those records also changes the geography of Nseir’s modernism. Cairo was the site of an artistic formation she continued to name decades later. Damascus provided the institutional field in which she exhibited and participated in a community of women artists. Beirut entered her practice both as a site of witness and as a site of circulation: she travelled there during the civil war to observe and draw its violence, while Mark Hachem Gallery presented her exhibition Creatures in the city in March 2015[24] (fig. 6). This transnational account does not weaken the historical specificity of her Syrian practice. It explains how that specificity was produced through movement and exchange.[25] Nseir often withheld titles and dates because she believed that a name could constrain the work’s possible readings. The difficulty this creates for art history was deliberate rather than merely archival. Yet the absence of a date does not release the work from history. It shifts historical attention from a linear succession of styles towards the encounters and institutions through which the image was formed.[26]
Nseir died in 2023. The undated faces remain frontal and wakeful, addressed to viewers whom she could not know. They perform for her the survival she constructed for her subjects: not the preservation of an intact likeness, but a continued presence sustained through encounter. The recovered archive gives that presence a history. Through it, the eye keeps looking.
Footnotes
[1] Nagham Hodaifa, “The Face and the Body in Syrian Art,” in Syria: Into the Light: Selection of Portraits and Figures in Syrian Art, from the Collection of the Atassi Foundation (Atassi Foundation, 2017), catalogue entry for Leila Nseir, Untitled, mixed media on carton, 37 x 27 cm.
[2] Ahlam al-Turk, “Leila Nseir: My Face is a Mirror of Your Faces” [ليلى نصير: وجهي مرآة لوجوهكم], interview, publication unidentified, 8 April 2008, MASA, Leila Nseir Archive, Atassi Foundation.
[3] Atassi Foundation, “Leila Nseir,” artist page, featured works 1/2 and 2/2, both catalogued as Untitled, mixed media on carton, 37 x 27 cm.
[4] Atassi Foundation, “Leila Nseir Archive Collection,” Modern Art of Syria Archive (MASA), biographical chronology, entry for 1959.
[5] Nour Asalia, “On Leila Nseir: Beyond Social & Artistic Conventions,” trans. Robin Moger (Dubai: Fiker Institute, June 2024), 4–5.
[6] Saleh Diab, “The Syrian Visual Artist Leila Nseir: There Is No Contradiction between Freedom and Rationality in Art,” interview, al-Safir, 8 October 1996, no. 7512.
[7] See also Anneka Lenssen, “Nseir, Leila (1941–),” Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism (Taylor & Francis, 2016), DOI: 10.4324/9781135000356-REM495-1, which situates Nseir within Syria’s national art movement and the socially engaged artistic formation of her generation.
[8] Hodaifa, “The Face and the Body in Syrian Art,” digital catalogue pp. 30–31. Hodaifa writes that most of Nseir’s faces confront the viewer through wide eyes.
[9] Ibid., digital catalogue pp. 2–5, on Fayum and Palmyrene portraiture as commemorative forms and carriers of memory.
[10] Ibid., digital catalogue pp. 10 and 28–30. Hodaifa’s explicit discussion of Syrian iconography concerns the wider regional tradition and, among modern artists, Elias Zayat. The comparison to Nseir is my extension.
[11] Ibid., digital catalogue p. 5, on the Tell Brak Eye Idols. The votive comparison is used here as a formal resemblance, not as evidence of direct influence.
[12] Leila Nseir, Fertility, 1994, print-pastel monotype on paper, courtesy Ayyam Gallery; listed in Istoria: A Retrospective Reimagining Middle Eastern Feminism with Leila Nseir, Ayyam Gallery, Dubai, 18 September –12 November 2024.
[13] Asalia, “On Leila Nseir,” 9, citing Saad al-Qasim’s comments in the unpublished televised interview Life and memories, MASA, Leila Nseir Archive, Atassi Foundation.
[14] Asalia, “On Leila Nseir,” 1, 6; Leila Nseir, The Martyr (The Nation), 1978, Barjeel Art Foundation.
[15] Salwa al-Zein, interview with Leila Nseir, al-Baath, 1985, MASA, Leila Nseir Collection, Atassi Foundation; discussed in Asalia, “On Leila Nseir,” 7 and n.14.
[16] See Beth Baron, “Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman,” in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 105–24; and Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20, no. 3 (1991): 429–43.
[17] Atassi Foundation, “The Archives of Leila Nseir,” MASA technical report, recording Nseir’s 1980 statement that the artist belongs to a particular era, class and nation; see also Asalia, “On Leila Nseir,” 10 and n.23.
[18] Atassi Foundation, “The Archives of Leila Nseir,” MASA technical report. This source dates Arab Woman and Art Creativity to 1975 and the exhibition with Asma Fayoumi, Greta Alwani and Shalabiya Ibrahim to 1984.
[19] Suhayl Khalil, “Leila Nseir Reads Her Artistic Experience: An Artist Who Paints in Rhymes and a Poet Who Writes in Colours.” [ليلى نصير تقرأ في تجربتها التشكيلية: فنانة ترسم بالقوافي وشاعرة تكتب بالألوان] interview, publication and date unknown, MASA, Leila Nseir Archive, Atassi Foundation.
[20] Ibid., on The Notebook of Poetry and Sculpture, 1969–72.
[21] “Conversation with Leila Nseir,” Al Ra’i Al ‘Am, 1983, MASA, Leila Nseir Archive, Atassi Foundation, cited in Asalia, “On Leila Nseir,” 9 and n. 20.
[22] Ahmad Kasha, account reproduced in Atassi Foundation, “The Archives of Leila Nseir,” trans. Basel Jbaily.
[23] Atassi Foundation, “The Archives of Leila Nseir,” MASA technical report.
[24] Ahmad Kasha, account reproduced in Atassi Foundation, “The Archives of Leila Nseir,” MASA, on Nseir’s journey to Beirut during the civil war; exhibition invitation, Leila Nseir, Creatures, Mark Hachem Gallery, Beirut, 20 March– 2 April 2015, MASA, Leila Nseir Archive, Atassi Foundation.
[25] Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), esp. Introduction. Lenssen similarly reconstructs Syrian modernism through transnational circulation, moving populations and the historically unstable boundaries of the Syrian nation-state.
[26] Asalia, “On Leila Nseir,” 3, citing al-Zein’s 1985 interview for Nseir’s statement that “a name lays a trap”.
Bibliography:
Modern Art of Syria Archive (MASA) by Atassi Foundation, Leila Nseir Archive Collection.
Nour Asalia, “On Leila Nseir: Beyond Social & Artistic Conventions,” trans. Robin Moger (Dubai: Fiker Institute, June 2024), 4–5.
Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).
Anneka Lenssen, “Nseir, Leila (1941–),” Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism (Taylor & Francis, 2016), DOI: 10.4324/9781135000356-REM495-1.
A Retrospective Reimagining Middle Eastern Feminism with Leila Nseir, Ayyam Gallery, Dubai, 18 September –12 November 2024.
Beth Baron, “Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman,” in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 105–24;
Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20, no. 3 (1991): 429–43.
Nagham Hodaifa, “The Face and the Body in Syrian Art,” in Syria: Into the Light: Selection of Portraits and Figures in Syrian Art, from the Collection of the Atassi Foundation (Atassi Foundation, 2017).