Zeena Sileem Zeena Mustafa Sileem · زينة مصطفى سليم

b. Iraq.

Lives and works in Toronto.

Zeena Sileem is a contemporary painter whose work moves between the vivid and the unsettling. Her figures arrive with their proportions rearranged: hands and feet enlarged, eyes widened past realism — and they hold the viewer's gaze with a directness that is closer to confrontation than invitation.

She trained in Baghdad, taking a diploma from the Institute of Fine Arts in 1994 and a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Baghdad in 1999, and has spent the decades since dismantling the conventional distinction between beauty and ugliness in search of what lies beneath it. The result is a visual language of bold contour and layered symbolism: intertwined fingers, floating umbrellas, fish carrying messages from some other world. Individually strange, together coherent — and deliberately open to more than one reading.

Her subjects are the contradictions she has lived among. Love and war. Music and stillness. Presence and absence. Sorrow, in her hands, is capable of carrying radiance; tenderness is capable of unsettling.

Sileem has held solo exhibitions in Toronto:

Umbrella at Arej Gallery (2017),

Long Distance Love at Hittite Gallery (2016), and

Ladies of the Season at Agora Gallery (2011)

As well as Nature's Dialogue at the Art Center, Baghdad (1999).

Her work has appeared in international group exhibitions since 1999 across Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Canada, and the United States, including Mesopotamia at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2021). Among her international awards is the City of Ottawa's Best Design award; the winning design was fabricated in metal and permanently installed on Bank Street.

She is a member of the Quinte Arts Council and Prince Edward County Arts, and continues to teach (most recently a still-life pastel workshop in Prince Edward County).

The Table is her solo exhibition at Dar Al-Anda Art Gallery, August 16 – September 6, 2026 and her first solo exhibition in Jordan.