Ziyarat Ashtar (The Visit of Ashtar)

In The Visit of Ashtar, Syrian modernist Fateh Moudarres masterfully intertwines mythology, memory, and political allegory, drawing on the enduring symbols of the Near East to reflect the condition of the contemporary Arab world. Ashtar, a figure rooted in both Mesopotamian and Canaanite mythology, often associated with love, war, and the celestial realm arrives not as a divine saviour, but as a witness to human suffering and resilience. The “visit” in Moudarres’ painting is quiet, solemn, and mysterious, a moment suspended in time that evokes both a ritual and a reckoning.

Moudarres often looked to Syria’s mythological past to articulate the traumas and disillusionments of the present. In this work, the presence of Ashtar may be read as both a return of the sacred and a mirror to human conflict, emblematic of his dialogue between ancient heritage and modern tragedy. His flat, icon-like figures heavily influenced by Byzantine iconography and Assyrian reliefs are rendered in a palette of subdued earth tones and shadowy contours. The abstraction of form serves not to obscure meaning but to universalize it, transforming the canvas into a psychological and spiritual landscape.

The Visit of Ashtar stands as a powerful example of Moudarres’ ability to collapse time, connecting Syria’s ancient mythology with its modern history of colonialism, dictatorship, and resistance. The divine becomes human, and the human divine, as past and present interlace on a stage where political and metaphysical questions converge.