For a country that has given the region so many extraordinary artists, one thing feels almost impossible to believe: Syria has never had an Art Week of its own. In just a few weeks, that changes.

Art Week Syria takes over Damascus from September 11–18, open to the public from the 13th, bringing established names and emerging talent together under one roof. And after more than a decade of conflict and enormous change, its arrival comes at a particularly significant moment for the country.

So, naturally, we had questions. Who will be there? What will Damascus see? And what does it take to bring an event like this together now? We went straight to the source: Line Kouwatli, founder and director of Art Week Syria — and someone you will remember from our earlier deep-dive into her collection of Syrian contemporary art. This time, Line is here to tell the story of the first edition in her own words.

My name is Line Kouwatli. I am a collector of Syrian contemporary art and an art curator — and now, very proudly, I can also call myself the founder and director of Art Week Syria.

Art Week Syria is an art and cultural platform centred around an exhibition of 47 artists, taking over Massar Rose in Damascus from September 11–18. The works span painting, sculpture, installations, digital art and photography, but the exhibition is only part of it. There will also be Syrian bands, four screenings of Syrian films, three art talks and a lecture on the history of architecture and art in Damascus.

It is a lot for a first edition — especially one that came together so quickly. But the story of Art Week Syria doesn’t really start with what it will look like. It starts with why it was born now. And once you understand that, everything else starts falling into place like pieces of the same puzzle.

The idea came after the fall of the former regime. For as long as many of us Syrians can remember, the art and cultural scene in Syria has been quite shy, dormant and overlooked in many ways. There isn’t really an established art and cultural ecosystem. Going to museums isn’t part of everyday culture in the way it is elsewhere, and neither is collecting art. And all of that is quite understandable: throughout the war, of course, people had other priorities.

Historically, there has been very little support for the art and cultural sector too, whether from the authorities or international institutions. Other sectors received far more attention, while culture was often left somewhere further down the list. For those of us in the art world, that has been difficult to watch.

And here is the strange contradiction: Syria may not have had the art ecosystem, but it has never been short of extraordinary talent.

There are incredibly talented Syrian artists creating extraordinary work. And when I look internationally — in Dubai, for example — I see just how much attention they receive. Wherever I go to art events, people tell me, “I wish we could meet Syrian artists in Syria.” After hearing that enough times, you start thinking: why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t people come here, meet these artists in their own country and see the work where it is actually being made?

That was really where Art Week Syria began. The funny thing is, it wasn’t supposed to become this big. It started as a much smaller project, and then, a few months ago, I suddenly found myself organising something huge.

The reason might sound a little sentimental, but it is what it is: once you start looking at who needs a platform, it becomes very difficult to stop. You start with visual artists. Then you look at musicians and think, they need one too. Then you look at cinema and realise there are films made during the war, documenting those years, that might never see the light or reach an audience. Suddenly, an art exhibition doesn’t feel like enough.

So the ambition grew with the project. We want to support artists, of course, but we also want to start building a proper cultural ecosystem in Syria. And I say building, rather than rebuilding, deliberately, because in many ways it wasn’t really there in the first place. If people have been saying for years that they want to discover Syrian artists in Syria, we want to finally give them a reason to come.

At the core of every art event are, of course, its artists — and Art Week Syria is bringing together 47 of them. But there is one important detail: for this first edition, we made a very intentional decision to focus primarily on Syrian artists who are actually based in Syria.

And there is a reason for that. Many incredibly talented artists working here simply haven’t had the same opportunities to show their work to an international audience — and we wanted to change that. There are a few exceptions, but most of the 47 live and work in Syria.

The 47 also span generations. There are pioneering names who have helped shape Syrian art, alongside emerging artists I discovered through this process myself. And choosing them was a mixture of different things: some came through an open call, others through our curatorial team, and then, of course, I had a few names of my own. I have been collecting Syrian contemporary art for years, so there are artists here whose work I already live with — Edward Shahda is one, and Ammar Abd Rabbo, whose photographs I collect, is another.

But some of my biggest surprises have been the young artists I didn’t know before. What strikes me is the incredible depth of their work. Sometimes you look at a piece and wonder what someone must have lived through to create something with that kind of weight. Their experiences have given them a certain wisdom, and art has become one of the ways they express it.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I mean is through the work itself. Asking me to pick from 47 artists is slightly cruel, but let me steal your attention for just three.

First is Dana Salameh, a young visual artist from the Damascus countryside. She is creating an interactive installation built around a balance, exploring freedom and the lack of it. What moves me is how something so simple opens up much bigger questions — about freedom, dialogue and ideas that, after 52 years of dictatorship, we are still learning how to navigate.

Then there is Safa Al Set, a sculptor who works with recycled materials and remnants left from the war, transforming them into something beautiful. For me, that is resilience in its purest form: how do you take something born from destruction and make something beautiful from what remains?

And then there is Ammar Abd Rabbo, both an exhibiting photographer and the curator of the photography section. He has spent years documenting Syria, from Aleppo during the war to the fall of the Assad regime. But what I love is that the photographs don’t need to scream war to tell you it was there. You might simply see children playing, with its traces still visible behind them. Sometimes, that quiet contrast says more than the most dramatic image could.

I didn’t want to leave the venue until the very end of this story, but perhaps it actually belongs here. Because the place chosen for Art Week Syria somehow perfectly matches everything we have been talking about so far.

When we reached the point of choosing the venue, I knew two things: it needed to have a real "wow effect", but it also needed to carry meaning. And this is where Massar Rose entered the picture.

For years, this enormous structure stood in the middle of Damascus, on the banks of the Barada River, visible to everyone but inaccessible to almost everyone. It was originally conceived under Asma al-Assad, Syria’s former first lady, as a project for children, but construction stopped at the beginning of the war in 2011 and the building remained unfinished.

For years, I had looked at it just like everyone else in Damascus, wondering what was actually inside. And when I finally got the chance to enter, I was amazed. The architecture is inspired by the Damascene rose, so the building opens almost like a flower, with an open centre and natural light moving through the space throughout the day.

But there was another reason I wanted it. This was a place connected to the former regime that people had spent years looking at without being able to access. Now we have the opportunity to reclaim it — to take it back for the people and the artists, and fill it with their work.

The building is still unfinished, and we actually love that. It has this raw, under-construction feeling that works incredibly well with the exhibition — and somehow feels right for the first Art Week Syria too.

From the outside, Art Week Syria might look like another ambitious art project joining a region already full of them. But for us, it is much more personal than that.

Syria has been under the shadow for a long time. Now we want to show what our artists can do, to make Damascus a place where people come for art, and, most importantly, to give young Syrian artists a reason to stay, grow and create here.

That is why everyone working on Art Week Syria sees it as more than a job. It feels like a cause we are all working towards because we believe in this country, and in Damascus in particular.

Am I nervous? Very. We had only three months to put everything together, we are a small team, and both time and money have been real constraints. But perhaps that is also why this first edition means so much to us.

For now, we simply want people to come, see what Syria's artists have been creating and discover Damascus through them. And we hope this is only the first Art Week Syria of many.