Ghorba - غربة
The Arabic word Ghorba — غربة — means strangeness or foreignness. It describes a feeling of exile — a longing for more familiar people and places. It is a ubiquitous theme of arts from across the Arab region, and it has a long history. In recent decades, art on the topic of ghorba has focused on the experiences of refugees from turmoil and immigrants seeking to reap the fruits of the empires they and their ancestors had built. Ghorba very certainly involves feelings of anguish. It can be taken as a sort of mourning. Some musical expressions of ghorba border on howling. But ghorba can be more than just hard feelings.
Foreign Agent’s September exhibition regards Ghorba not just as a feeling of great sorrow but as the source of inspiration it has always been. In this exhibition, artist Massoud Hayoun revisits the legacies of his Tunisian and Moroccan-Egyptian grandparents who raised him as well as several people and places he has visited in his work as a journalist. In doing so, he explores the philosophical potential of the ghorba he has encountered in himself and others. In these works, Hayoun mines his experiences of strangeness and longing in order to discover underlying truths on a wide array of topics from gender roles to government accountability to immigration.
Particularly as the world emerges from the immense loss of the pandemic, we are many of us familiar with some sort of ghorba for lost loved ones and lost time. Foreign Agent’s Ghorba show explores the possibilities for an reemergence where that collective sense of loss informs our sense of empathy for and solidarity with each other. The concept of ghorba is, in its origin, Arab, but it is also universal, insofar as otherness is a human condition. Hayoun’s work explores those boundaries to their fullest potential, and it offers a means of turning our loss into a reason to experience radical love for one another.
About the artist
Massoud Hayoun is a 35-year-old painter from Los Angeles. His work lies at a far-out intersection of the personal and political and radically reimagines the lives of his dead North African grandparents, who raised him. He began to paint in August 2022. Mathqaf art organization has heralded him as an "artist crush du jour" and called his work "incredible," and he has already garnered solo and group shows across the United States through 2024, most recently at Band of Vices in Los Angeles.
Hayoun is also an award-winning author and journalist. His first non-fiction book, a decolonial memoir of his grandparents and political theory of Arab identity entitled "When We Were Arabs,” won an Arab American Book Award for breaking new ground in Arab and Arab American studies and was a U.S. National Public Radio best book of the year. Ai Weiwei called his second book, a novel set in China, "exquisite." He has reported internationally for news outlets including Al Jazeera, CNN, and Agence France-Presse. Narrative truth-telling unifies his artistic, literary, and journalistic practices.
