Qatar Museums’ Museum of Islamic Art presents ‘Shattered, 2023’

Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) presents Shattered, 2023 – artist Felekşan Onar’s latest installation that uses glass as the medium, running until May 7, 2024 at MIA’s Damascus Room, Gallery 12.
Onar’s latest work is hard-carved and gold painted mold-blown glass birds that signify human displacement caused by the recent earthquakes that devastated Southeast Turkey and Northern Syria, resulting in over 55,000 casualties.
In a press statement, MIA Curatorial Affairs’ deputy director Shaika Nasser al-Nassr said: “Felekşan Onar’s creative journey explores the profound impact political unrest, war, and natural disasters have on people. Her latest work Shattered, is an intervention into the interiors of the Damascus Room of MIA, which itself went through many years of reassembly and restoration and has over time provided a haven for the items that have historically inhabited the space, finding temporary refuge.”
Building upon the success of her acclaimed project Perched, which debuted in the Aleppo Room at the Pergamon Museum, later exhibited at Victoria & Albert and the Damascus Room at Dresden State Museums, Onar now returns to the language of birds with her latest work, and glass as her ideal medium.
Her mold blown birds mimic a traditional Japanese technique typically used for repairing ceramics. Known as Kintsugi, the technique joins fragments with gold, leaving the cracks visible. Onar associates these cracks with the damage caused by disaster, but in doing so, emphasises the beauty that arises from transformation and change.
“Birds serve as symbols of both fragility and strength and often undergo a similar process of repair and restoration following the effects of natural disasters”, Felekşan Onar said. “The glass birds echo the pain of human displacement but also show its resilience to emerge victorious, contrary to its surrounding circumstances and environment.”
Born and raised in Turkey, Onar works between Istanbul, Berlin, Venice, and New York. Originally emerging as an artistic reaction to population displacements resulting from political unrest and war, Onar's creative journey has evolved to encompass a reflection on the profound impact of natural disasters.