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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

We are delighted to announce Bayan Kiwan’s first solo exhibition with Sfeir-Semler, in our Downtown space in Beirut. Bayan Kiwan (b. 1995 in Amman, Jordan, based between New York and Amman) is a Palestinian–Jordanian painter whose research and practice are driven by questions of place, memory, and the everyday.

The central work of the exhibition, Intimate Trespasses, is a large painting measuring 178.5 × 349.5 cm, which lends its title to the show. In a Brooklyn apartment, glimpses of gatherings that followed demonstrations collapse into a continuous yet overlapping panorama. The persons portrayed are united by a shared belief that another reality is still possible. The painting unfolds the room, displaying the spilling of the political into the intimate.

The show brings together new paintings and ceramics that further Kiwan’s investigation of the domestic spaces. Rather than foregrounding rupture, the artist lingers on moments of tenderness, minor details almost unnoticeable in their banality. Gestures of reckoning (bodies folded-over, eyes squeezed shut, hands raised to cheeks or heads) are met by soothing embraces, gentle strokes, or bodies lying closely together, revealing the quiet power of touch to sustain life.

Dominated by reds and pinks, her figurative canvases capture scenes of fleeting sensual excess, set in the fragile moments when exhaustion has set in, realization is dawning, and both bodies and minds absorb the weight of the events that envelop them. Situated within the intimacy of living rooms and bedrooms, the works play with perspective and point of view, positioning the viewer as an unwitting witness to these unguarded moments. Inconspicuous everyday objects offer hints of narrative context, including a spoon left on a table, a newspaper carelessly tossed on a sideboard, the graphic on a T-shirt, a fading bouquet in a vase, or rumpled sheets.

Forming a counterpart to the paintings, a series of ceramic sculptures lines the gallery wall. Kiwan shapes the clay into folds, fires it, and then paints portraits, faces, arms, or hands, before firing the pieces a second time. The heat of the kiln melts the paint and allows glaze particles to drip, softening the contours of the depicted bodies and bringing their felt experiences into sharper relief. What might look at first glance like isolated details, or fragments of life, actually forms a body of work that draws the viewer into a space of emotional and sensory engagement.

Ultimately, Kiwan’s work foregrounds how love and its quiet, sustaining force moves us through grief, vulnerability and loss. Intimate Trespasses uncovers suspended moments in mundane scenes, underscoring the innocuous potential of ordinary spaces to become sites of nurture and care.