Sculpture doesn't necessarily mean marble, bronze and something standing on a pedestal. For these Syrian artists, it can be a city you walk through, a map that refuses to tell you where you are, a structure that seems to be melting in front of you.

Kevork Mourad, Khozema Al-Aaed and Diana Al-Hadid work very differently, but they share an interest in what physical objects can hold: memory, architecture, displacement, loss and the traces people leave behind.

The Syrian-Armenian artist, born in Qamishli in 1970, trained as a printmaker before developing a practice that now moves between drawing, sculpture, installation, animation and live performance — sometimes created in direct dialogue with musicians.

His installations are particularly good at making a drawing feel like somewhere you can actually enter. Memory Gates (2021), for example, consists of enormous hand-cut cotton structures covered in Mourad’s drawings. Arches and doorways appear and disappear across them, mixed with Arabic and Armenian script and fragments of architectural forms remembered from Aleppo. Instead of reconstructing one real place, Mourad builds something closer to a city assembled from memory.

Then there is Seeing Through Babel, his monumental response to the Tower of Babel, and the much newer The Wounded Bird (2026), a large suspended installation made from acrylic and ink on cotton. The materials are light, almost fragile, but Mourad uses them to build environments that can completely take over a room.

Maps are supposed to tell you where you are. Khozema Al-Aaed makes ones that do almost the opposite.

Khozema works with sculpture, drawing and installation, often using iron, wood, stone and concrete. His ongoing Cities series turns geography into something much more personal: instead of roads and borders, you get layers, scars, cavities, symbols and fragments.

Some pieces look like aerial maps of cities that don't quite exist. Others feel closer to archaeological remains or pieces of infrastructure dug out of the ground. Rust is left visible rather than disguised; Al-Aaed treats corrosion as part of the work, evidence that the material itself has gone through something. One enormous Cities sculpture from 2025 is made entirely from iron and stretches almost five metres long. Another takes the form of a huge suspended circle of corroded metal.

For his 2026 Dubai exhibition We Walk on Stories, Al-Aaed pushed this idea further, creating what the gallery describes as “abstract cartographies”: maps stripped of the information normally used to orient us, leaving memory, movement and belonging in its place.

At first glance, Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures can look like someone built an elaborate palace and then caught it halfway through collapsing.

Born in Aleppo in 1981 and raised in the United States from childhood, the Syrian-American artist is known for huge, incredibly detailed constructions made from materials including steel, fibreglass, polymer gypsum, plaster and metal leaf. Architecture is constantly appearing in them — towers, arches, columns, grottoes — but rarely in a stable form. Things drip, dissolve, lean and seem to hover somewhere between construction and ruin.

Take Nolli’s Orders: a sprawling landscape of platforms, fragments and architectural forms that looks somewhere between an archaeological ruin and a city caught in the middle of melting. Or At the Vanishing Point, where a monumental stepped structure seems to disintegrate precisely where it meets the floor. Her earlier work, The Tower of Infinite Problems, pushes the same idea even further — a huge, unstable-looking construction that appears to be collapsing and holding itself together at the same time.

More recently, Al-Hadid took this fascination with unstable architecture to an even larger scale with The Ziggurat Splits the Sky (2023–2025), a monumental commission for the Princeton University Art Museum. More than 12 metres long and nearly five metres high, the work borrows the stepped form of an ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat, but turns it into something fragmented and surprisingly light. Made from aluminium, bronze and glass, the structure appears to split apart and dissolve into the space around it, with fragments of a human figure and a Medusa mosaic embedded into the composition.