“EXERCISES IN RUINS”: OMAR MISMAR’S FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION IN ITALY
After his success at the latest Venice Biennale, Omar Mismar (b. 1986, Lebanon) presents his first solo exhibition in Italy, hosted by SECCI in Via Olmetto, Milan, and curated by Marco Scotini. The show unfolds as a layered and powerful journey intertwining memory and desire. Beginning in 2015, when Mismar met the “Monuments Men” of Syria—particularly Abou Farid, the conservator of the Ma’arrat al-Numan Museum—the artist started working with photographic documentation gifted to him by Farid. His works expose the paradox of an authoritarianism that uses hypermodern media to perpetuate an archaic image of power, while technology—designed to connect—continually reveals its own limitations: interruptions, disappearances, disconnections. The sense of distance—physical, emotional, temporal—is the red thread running through the final rooms of the exhibition.
The series Torsos (2025) depicts male busts drawn from dating apps as if they were classical relics: fragmented bodies of desire, suspended in time, forever incomplete. The neon work The Path of Love (2013) translates into a luminous sign the walking route Mismar took to meet a partner he had encountered on a dating app. Here too, the focus is not on the encounter itself, but on the yearning toward it—a tension often thwarted by glitches, digital disappearances, and unbridgeable distances.
The political and emotional core of the exhibition crystallizes in the large opening hall, dominated by three monumental mosaics inspired by the story of Salman al-Nabahin and his son Ahmad in the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. During the arduous cultivation of their olive trees, Salman unearthed a Byzantine mosaic beneath the soil. Olive in the Sun (2025) evokes the shadow of oblivion threatening this archaeological discovery, while Ahmad with the Sponge (2025) and Salman in a Squat (2025) portray fragile yet steadfast gestures of care toward a memory endangered by bombs. These works are fragments of absence—icons of a life suspended between what once was and what may never be again.
Mismar constructs a poetics of ruins not as an end, but as an exercise—Exercises in Ruins—of resistance, memory, and desire. Through the ancient material of mosaic, the artist offers an image of the present: interrupted, incomplete, yet still animated by an irreducible impulse to connect, to remember, to love. A timely and necessary exhibition.
