ART
A Giant Among Men
Jordan-based Iraqi artist Miramar Muhd creates towering black-and-white portraits, often of women, on the streets of Amman.
By India Stoughton
Miramar Muhd has never done anything by halves. “When I was a kid, I didn’t eat a piece of cake; I ate the whole cake. I didn’t drink one glass of juice; I drank the whole litre of juice,” she says. “It’s something that’s been with me since I was a kid, although I’m really tiny.” At 16, after finishing her first painting on canvas, she went straight to the most prestigious art gallery in Amman and asked them to give her an exhibition. When they politely declined, “I was really angry,” she recalls. “I went back home and I started thinking, ‘Is there a place where I can exhibit my work and it can be accessible to everybody?’ And that was the street.” Almost a decade on, she laughs as she tells the story of how she came to be one of Jordan’s scant handful of female street artists.
Today, the 25-year-old Iraqi painter, whose real name is Miramar Al Nayyar, is a well-established fixture on Amman’s burgeoning street art scene, which has grown rapidly in the seven years since she painted her first public mural. Her father is a commercial artist and she grew up visiting his studio, where she developed a fascination with the materials and tools he used. “It introduced me to what art can do, what it is,” she says. “I was educated in a public school and most of my classmates don’t know what a canvas is. It was pretty basic. So I consider myself to be privileged.”
After her disappointment with the art gallery, Muhd was determined to create large-scale murals on the street, where her art would impact everybody. But when an opportunity finally arose and permission was granted for her to paint, “I was so scared,” she says. “In the studio you’re by yourself, nobody can see you. You can experiment and make mistakes. But in the street it’s totally the opposite. You need to be considerate of everybody and everybody’s watching you.”
Here/There This mural, part of The Factory In/Out Festival in Amman, was inspired by sculptor Hans Jörg Limbach’s Think Partner in Stuttgart.
The self-taught artist overcame her trepidation, figuring out her technique as she went along. She was acting on a powerful need to create murals that covered whole buildings, instead of a few square metres of canvas. “I felt big, at some point. I wanted to just roam around like a giant and paint,” she says. Gradually, she began to specialise in portraits—particularly of women.
“It is hard here to be a woman, especially if you’re doing difficult physical work. You will make men feel less secure and you know when toxic masculinity feels insecure, what they do. For me it’s a revolutionary act just being a woman,” she says. Working out on the streets, she is often interrupted by men who ask whether she knows what she’s doing. “They make you feel so little, despite creating something very big…They treat you as a woman, not as an artist, and the way they treat women in this society, they look down at them,” she says. “That’s why I paint women’s portraits in the street. It’s a male-dominated society and I like to create a big face of a woman in the middle.”
In December 2019, after winning a competition organised by the Dutch embassy as part of a campaign to raise awareness of gender-based violence, Muhd and her friend Dalal Mitwally spent six days working on a crane, high above the city, creating a 25-metre-high portrait of a woman with her head tilted back and her eyes closed in contemplation. Behind her, written in red, is a line from a poem by young Jordanian poet Seba Al Abbadi, which reads, “Let your eyes be cast on the mountaintops.” They wanted to capture the woman “looking inward towards her own mountaintops, which symbolise strength,” Muhd says. The competition was launched in the midst of nationwide protests in response to a brutal act of domestic violence in northern Jordan that had left a woman blind. “My intention when I finished the mural was to gift it to the woman in Jerash as I deeply felt it was meant to be for her.” As they worked, the pair faced disparaging comments from local shopkeepers, all men, but when they finished, “I felt like something changed in the whole vibe of the street,” she says. “I felt like there was more respect.”
Let Your Eyes Be Cast on the Mountaintops The 25-metre-high mural in downtown Amman was part of a campaign to raise awareness of gender-based violence.
Working mostly in greyscale, Muhd seeks to convey emotion through her work, whether through the expression on a face or the way fingers intertwine on a pair of clasped hands. Her subjects are diverse, including a portrait of Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize, and a mural inspired by Swiss sculptor Hans Jörg Limbach’s Think Partner in Stuttgart. “The wall really inspires you. When you go to the site and look at what’s surrounding the wall, the faces of the people living around the area—all of that influences the concept,” she says. “When it comes to street art, I really don’t paint from within, I paint through people…Each art project is different because it’s more communal than individual.”
Muhd dropped out of university, where she was studying animation, to make art her full-time career. “It was really hard at the beginning—[I was] broke almost every day. But now it’s completely the opposite,” she says. “It’s all about balance—balancing between street art and studio art, balancing between commercial and personal.” Now several years into her practice, with a strong awareness of her own style and visual language, she is considering attending art school in Spain to expand her technical knowledge. She has recently moved towards a more abstract style, focusing on texture, light and movement, and wants to try her hand at sculpture. For a recent dance performance in Amman, she created an otherworldly circular floor mural that seemed to hover above the stage and evoked sinuous, swirling movements in a series of swooping black-on-white lines.
But even as she tackles new kinds of work, the physical act of changing the city is important for the young artist. “I’ve noticed it really inspires people, especially women and little girls, when they see someone hanging in mid-air, painting something very big,” she says. “I feel it makes them feel they can achieve something similar in spirit as a woman…There are a lot of things that make you feel very little as a woman here and I’m very happy I can be in that position in this society.”
Portrait of Miramar Muhd by Hiba Nabulsi. Mural photos by Muhammad Emad.
