Green Art Gallery presents Damascenes, a solo show of Syrian artist Khaldoun Chichakli’s works. Amidst the destruction wrought by the current political situation, Chichakli’s drawings and woodcuts offer a poignant look into the Damascus of years gone by. A professor at the city’s Fine Arts University, Chichakli first began drawing the city centre from memory as a way to while away the tedium of proctoring examinations. He employs the ‘tahsheer’ method of first drawing fine lines then going over them to darken an area, almost as if to bring back the past through a repeated gesture of reinscription. These black and white images are subsequently scanned, printed, and then brilliantly recoloured to show the same scene at different times of day or night. Even as clouds give way to sunsets or stars, the people and buildings remain immobilised as if in a tableau vivant, frozen in time and frozen in

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