Artist: Massoud Hayoun

Hayoun’s paintings are an ongoing investigation into enduring systems of control and the redeeming power of culture and community. In this new body of work, Hayoun continues to draw upon the rich legacy of his Egyptian, Tunisian heritage, specifically the stories shared by his elders that speak of exile and loss but also love and resistance. Their portraits populate his canvases, immortalised in tones of blue that shimmer between past and present and positioned in intimate dialogue with icons of Arabic cinema and song or alongside kindred spirits facing upheaval and displacement.

Family stories - the celebrated love between his Tunisian great-great grandparents, his grandfather’s insatiable sweet tooth, his great grandmother’s hatred of being touched in the heat of summer – broaden into allegories that stretch across time. Persecuted figures from history find their contemporary allies among feminist poets, daydreaming waitresses and Hayoun’s own alter ego, who shapeshifts across multiple works, reconfiguring dominant narratives around what it is to be a Jewish, Arab man.

Hayoun paints in solidarity with those at the sharpest end of political oppression. He paints to ensure we do not forget. His work is also “a radical refusal”; a technicolour world that chooses to celebrate the idiosyncratic, the humane and the joyful, underpinned by a faith in the stories that unite rather than separate.