Bio
Esraa Dayrwan was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1990. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in the English Language and its Arts (2013) from Damascus University and a Diploma of Fine Arts in Photography (2025) from the School of Fine Arts Leipzig. In 2013, after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, she moved with her family to Beirut, where she worked as a translator. At the end of 2015, she moved to Leipzig, where she now studies and works.
She is currently part of the Photography and Moving Image class, Tina Bara, at the HGB Leipzig as a Meisterschülerin (postgraduate student).
Since October 2022, she has been a scholarship recipient from the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Artist Statement
My work explores memory, trauma, and the fluidity of identity in times of crisis and instability. Using photography and collage, I create multi-layered visual narratives that examine how inner worlds and intimate structures are shaped by external pressures and upheavals. The Syrian civil war, migration and exile have had a fundamental effect on my visual language; hence, the scenes I create are often crowded with elements that juxtapose the present and the past, mapping physical places and emphasising the continuities and intertextuality of human experiences. Through my artistic practice, I use personal and archival materials to inspect, translate, and deconstruct gestures and motifs, rendering them negotiable and open to interpretation.
