This work investigates the psychological terrain of memory, trauma, and identity through allegorical visual narratives. Using staged photography and collage, Dayrwan translates intangible emotional states into constructed scenes that invite layered interpretation. Her process begins with fleeting visual impressions, fragmentary images emerging from mental landscapes, gradually assembled into cohesive, emotionally charged compositions. In doing so, Dayrwan externalises internal experiences, crafting photographs that function as both personal testimony and open-ended visual inquiry.

Central to her practice is the understanding that inner life is rarely singular or coherent. The unconscious, as described by Freud, is layered and unresolved, its content often repressed yet still influential. In Dayrwan’s visual language, these psychological complexities manifest through symbolic mise-en-scène and multi-perspective constructions. The photographic image becomes a space where the interior and exterior, the conscious and unconscious, converge. Staging operates as a psychological mechanism: a method of processing and confronting inner conflict. Likewise, photography becomes not merely a tool for documentation, but a method of temporal and emotional reconstruction. Each image operates as a condensed narrative, a visual fragment that resists fixed meaning while evoking multiple timelines and emotional registers.

In "Study of Two Figures", Dayrwan draws on archetypal motifs such as Edvard Munch’s Love and Pain and the traditional Pietà. Her photographic staging references their aesthetic language while subverting expected connotations, inviting viewers into a space of emotional ambiguity and layered symbolism.

The use of collage further expands this complexity. Through the layering of disparate images Dayrwan collapses spatial and temporal boundaries, where past and present, personal and collective, dissolve into one another.

Themes of exile, familial attachment, and spatial displacement surface frequently in her work. In “Raheel/رحيل ”, Dayrwan addresses the fear of parental loss while being staged to the backdrop of the Syrian war. Funeral imagery is interwoven with destroyed urban landscapes from Damascus, merging the mourning of familial figures with the mourning of a city.

In “Portrait with a mask”, identity is rendered fluid, the body and the city entangled. The mask becomes a metaphor for the shifting, performative, and often fragmented nature of selfhood, especially under the pressures of forced migration and cultural dislocation.

Throughout her practice, Esraa Dayrwan invites the viewer into a visual world where trauma is reassembled, identity is negotiated, and memory becomes a mutable surface. Her images resist closure, instead offering a space of visual meditation shaped by tension, tenderness, and transformation.