Suzan Bushnaq’s Artwork (Uzbekistan)

This artwork titled “Death and Life, Joy and Sorrow, and all the contrast morals …” was painted in Tashkent in 1989. It was Suzan Bushnaq’s graduation project, the outcome of her study in Uzbekistan. It is dedicated to Lebanese poet, artist and philosopher Gibran Khalil Gibran.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, a new political leader - Nikita Khrushchev - came to power. His landmark decisions in foreign policy markedly changed the direction of the Soviet Union. Thus a period of improved relations between the USSR and the Arab countries began in the mid-1950s. Over the course of the 1960s-70s the Soviet Union created a dedicated program meant to attract Arab artists and scholars from around the world. Various prominent art institutions in the Soviet Union participated in these exchange programs, including the Uzbekistan State Institute of Arts – until now the leading centre of art education.

It was a matter of prestige for Uzbekistan to give foreign students the best that Soviet education could offer, as proof of the superiority of the socialist model of education over the capitalist one. And the educational program, offered to foreign students, was very attractive. In addition to free tuition and medical care, undergraduate students would receive a monthly stipend, and an annual allowance to buy technical and scientific literature for their personal use. They were also given free hostel accommodation, an opportunity to visit rest homes and sanatoria and to participate in excursions throughout the USSR free of charge. At the end of their studies the Soviet government met all transportation expenses back to their home countries.

Among the Arab art students of the Uzbek Institute were Palestinians, Yemenis, Algerians and others. The first Arab students joined the institute in 1981. Husni Abu Krayem (Palestine / Jordan) studied graphic art. The Yemenis Muhammed Jafar and Ali Abdu Yahya – easel painting. In 1982 Suzan Bushnaq (Kuwait / Palestine) joined the faculty of graphic art.

Suzan Bushnaq (b. 1963) was born and raised in Kuwait. She grew up surrounded by the art of her late father, the pioneering Palestinian artist and sculptor, Mohammad Bushnaq, who established his own artistic identity in his adoptive country, Kuwait, after he had to leave his native land in 1948 during the Palestinian war. Suzan Bushnaq’s creative talents took form organically early on, in a home that knew the canvas, brush, and colour well. She began her formal art training under the watchful eyes of her father. From there, her talents and her love for art took her to the USSR. She joined the educational exchange program based on the recommendation of an NGO - the Union of Palestinian Women that had a right, based on the international agreement, to allocate quotas for Palestinian students to study in the USSR. She was one the first Arab artists, and the first female Arab art student, to study between 1982 and 1989 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in the Uzbekistan State Institute of Arts. Her graduation project was dedicated to the Lebanese poet, artist and philosopher Gibran Khalil Gibran, entitled “Death and Life, Joy and Sorrow, and all the contrast morals …”. This project served as a vehicle to create allegories that reveal the dark side of human nature. These tales were drawn from the artist’s own personal experiences and boldly take on the themes of happiness and sorrow.

Upon the completion of her studies and return to Kuwait, Suzan Bushnaq was faced with a major challenge – the invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990. The two-day operation, conducted by Iraq against the neighbouring State of Kuwait, resulted in the seven-month-long Iraqi occupation of the country. This tragic event left a distinct mark on her artistic style that eventually developed through the fusion of academic training, her father’s artistic influence and personal experience both in Palestine and Kuwait, generating a unique prism through which she projects her creations. Traversing realism, expressionism and surrealism, she forms her own style that delves into the feminine figure, highlighting its power, vitality and beauty, and deploying colours with the skill of a master artist. Her personal story takes us through her passion for forms, shapes, figures and storylines, where all these elements serve as players in a complex visual drama. Sometimes her anguish and her anger penetrate through the paintings, are nourished by the suffering of people in Palestine as is expressed through the female figures in her paintings – the main character that appears throughout her oeuvre.

Olga Nefedova is an art historian and the former director of the Orientalist Museum in Doha, Qatar. She has worked for many years with private and government collections in the Far East, Middle East, and the Gulf countries (Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia). She is an associate professor at the National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Currently she is a researcher at the Orient-Institut, Beirut (Max Weber Foundation) - a member of the OIB research project “Relations in the Ideoscape: Middle Eastern Students in the Eastern Bloc (1950s to 1991).”