DUBAI: Los Angeles-based artist and author Massoud Hayoun has spent his career exploring identity, exile and resistance.
His latest exhibition, “Stateless,” running at London’s Larkin Durey art gallery until June 27, is an exploration of control, culture and community.
Raised by his grandparents, Hayoun paints their stories of exile, love and resilience in shades of blue, blending personal narratives with icons of Arab cinema and song to highlight shared cultural memories.
His paintings are imbued with the legacy of his Egyptian and Tunisian Jewish heritage, but they also reach beyond his own family’s history. His grandfather left Egypt, and his mother was born without citizenship — experiences that deeply inform his work.
In “Stateless,” he extends this exploration of displacement and belonging to other communities, particularly Palestinians and undocumented Americans, he told Arab News. “In this show, you’ll find people suspended between homeland and refuge, suspended in mid-air, suspended between life and death and living out a sort of existentialist heroism, suspended in undying romance,” he said.
Hayoun’s journey to painting was shaped by his background in journalism. A former journalist, he is also the author of “When We Were Arabs,” a book on Arab identity that won an Arab American Book Award and was named a National Public Radio best book of the year in 2019.
His transition from writing to painting was a natural evolution. “I am a figurative painter — I paint people. My journalism was animated by a love of people and a desire to better understand, through interviews like this, people from walks of life drastically different to my own,” he said.
His use of blue is deliberate. Initially reserved for people who had died, the color now engulfs all his subjects, evoking the transient nature of identity and existence. “At first, I only painted my grandparents and other dead people in shades of blue, because to my mind, the glow of it seemed ghostly. I cast other people in different colors to signify other states of being. Eventually, after reflections on time, everyone became blue, even myself,” he said.
Yet, at its core, Hayoun’s work is about more than politics — it is about love. “These works touch on sweeping political, philosophical and sociological issues, but they are fundamentally about love for people,” he said.
“They are meant in the way my grandparents expressed anxiety as a kind of love—fear for my well-being, fervent hopes that I live well and in dignity. These paintings are explosions of love,” he added.
