Sara Shamma moved back to Damascus in late 2024, unaware that within weeks, the country around her would change – and her life with it.
The fall of the Assad government that December opened a new and uncertain period for Syria. For Shamma, who had spent years between Lebanon and London before returning home, it also changed the meaning of a years-long project: a full-scale tower tomb inspired by Palmyra, first planned for Cambridge, before the pandemic stopped it.
Now the finished piece debuts at Syria’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Shamma is the first female artist to lead the pavilion; her immersive solo presentation places her among the first to officially represent the new Syria on the world stage.
“When the Ministry of Culture in Syria approached me ... I was very happy,” Shamma tells <i>The National</i>. “I told them that I have this project. I think it would be very good for the Syrian pavilion.”
The project’s roots go back to her earlier days in Damascus, where Shamma would visit a recreated Palmyra tomb – an ancient multistorey monument built between the 1st century BCE and 3rd century CE in Palmyra – crafted with a mix of original fragments and reconstructed pieces.
“At the National Museum of Damascus, you go down four or five steps, and you find a space like the one in Palmyra,” she says. “It was very inspiring. I used to go there when I was at university and draw and paint all these portraits.”
Shamma is presenting The Tower Tomb of Palmyra, curated by Yuko Hasegawa and commissioned by the Syrian Ministry of Culture. The installation, set up in the open-air courtyard of Iuav University of Venice’s Cotonificio campus, is conceived at full scale, with an interior shaped by painting, light, sound and scent.
The exhibition takes the form of a nine-sided chamber, with two rows of paintings rising four metres around visitors. The paintings draw from Palmyrene funerary portraiture, but the figures belong to Shamma’s own visual language.
In the months leading up to the Biennale, Hasegawa also travelled to Syria's capital, visiting Shamma’s studio and the recreated Palmyra cemetery at the National Museum. The visit helped sharpen one of the installation’s practical challenges: how to bring light into a tomb-like space without windows.
“We talked a lot about light,” Shamma says. “There is a lot of yellow, and yellow is a new colour for me. These paintings look shiny or fluorescent. Because it’s a cemetery and there are no windows, the paintings themselves should give you the feeling of the window, of the sun.”
The same thinking shaped the sound and scent.
“There are smells of some herbs from the desert,” Shamma says. “A sound artist recorded the sound of Palmyra, the sound of the wind there, or the sand there.”
Palmyra has long been one of Syria’s most recognisable ancient sites. Between the first and third centuries AD, it developed as a meeting point for Greco-Roman, Aramaic and Arab cultures. Its tower tombs, built for extended families, rose above the desert landscape and held rows of burial niches sealed with sculpted portraits of the dead.
During the Syrian war, Palmyra’s monuments were heavily damaged, and many funerary objects were looted or dispersed. The pavilion materials frame the work partly as a call for the restitution of antiquities taken during the conflict and as a response to the loss of cultural memory.
The portraits are also where Palmyra connects to the rest of Shamma’s work. Her paintings have long centred on bodies and faces, with expressions and physical tension carrying much of the work’s emotional weight.
“I have always been interested in humans, in figures, in faces, since I was very young, and it is still my obsession,” she says. “People are so rich in the diversity of the shape of the faces and the psychology of each person. This is, for me, a whole universe that I kept digging in until now.”
Shamma was born in Damascus in 1975 and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus in 1998. Her career has moved between Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf and the UK, with recent solo exhibitions including Bold Spirits at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and Modern Slavery, which began at King’s College London before touring UK cathedrals. In late 2024, after eight years of living and working in the UK, she returned permanently to Syria's capital.
Her return came far later than she had originally anticipated. Shamma had lived outside Syria since 2012 and had stopped exhibiting in the city after 2011. Early in the war, she began keeping one or two paintings from each year, hoping to display them one day at the National Museum of Damascus. What she thought might take five or six years took more than a decade.
The exhibition, Echoes of 12 Years, opened at the museum in November 2024. Weeks later, Bashar Al Assad's government fell. The museum closed for about a month, she says, while the show remained inside. Because it included large paintings with nudity, other artists urged her to remove the works before anyone else intervened.
“All my friends and the artists, they said, remove your paintings, because these people will burn them,” Shamma says. “I had a feeling. I said, no, I won’t remove it. I will keep it. And I’m sure that my exhibition will reopen in the new regime, in the new government again.”
The museum reopened and the exhibition continued. For Shamma, the episode challenged some of the fears artists had expressed at the time.
“At the beginning, many people were afraid,” she says. “A lot of people thought that the new government is very Islamist and maybe, they won’t accept art or artists.”
The larger problem for artists in Syria remains economic, she says. Galleries are operating in a difficult environment, and many Syrian artists continue to show abroad. At the same time, she sees the Venice presentation as a shift in how Syria is organising its international presence.
Previous years saw several artists brought together. The result did not always feel like a single national project, she says. This year, the pavilion is built around one artist, one curator and one full-scale installation.
“I’m very happy to be part of this new Syria,” she says. “That’s a very important thing. This pavilion will be very new to the Syrian pavilion that used to be in the past. I’m very happy today that the Ministry of Culture ... wanted to do a pavilion that can compete with other major international pavilions in the world.”
The work is also tied to where it was made. Shamma says each city in which she has worked has altered her paintings in some way.
“Creating in any place will affect the work differently,” she says. “The smell of the air is different. The humidity is different. The sun, the colour of the sky is different. The clouds are different. Everything visually, and also that is reflecting inside your body, is different.”
That relationship between life and work is part of how Shamma thinks about painting. The return to Damascus, the museum exhibition and the Venice pavilion are not separate from the conditions in which they were made.
“I feel that my life also is like my work,” she says. “I always create something. I always think in a different way. There is nothing that cannot happen.”
In Venice, Shamma hopes the pavilion can present Syria to visitors as a country with histories and images that extend beyond war and destruction. In her view, a new Syria is one that embraces the many facets of its rich history – and helps the world understand it, too.
“I would love people to rediscover Syria and re-understand this complicated country,” Shamma says. “This is a very rich and interesting and warm country. I want people to feel everything about Syria, understand the loss and be able to be part of this rebirth.”
Sara Shamma’s The Tower Tomb of Palmyra is on display at Syria’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale until November 22
