Zein Sourany

I am not a calligrapher. I am a poet who writes by hand.
The Arabic script in my work is my own — composed, not transcribed. Each piece begins as a poem written in the margins of a life spent between conflict zones, peacekeeping missions, and displacement. Fifteen years across Lebanon, the Arab world, and international humanitarian work left me with a particular relationship to language: as witness, as survival, as the thing that holds when institutions fail and borders shift.
ENJZ — which means accomplish in Arabic — carries the initials of what I cannot afford to lose.
The work asks what happens when a private text enters visual space. When handwriting becomes image. When a poem written in exile finds a surface large enough to breathe. The background does not decorate the script — it is the atmosphere the poem already inhabits: fragile, luminous, not entirely resolved.
I make these works in Madrid. I think in Arabic. I am still, in some sense still in Lebanon.