"THE TABLE" by Zeena Sileem
A journey into introspection, silence, and the spaces we leave untouched
Dar Al-Anda is pleased to present The Table, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Zeena Sileem.
The artist calls it, sometimes, the Theater of Oddities. A table in her work is never only furniture. It is a surface that keeps what is set down on it — the initials, the ring marks, the cigarette burns, the conversations that stopped short. Seven of them anchor this exhibition, each one carrying a story the artist has written for it.
Sileem paints people the way tables hold them: without flattery, and without looking away. Hands and feet arrive enlarged past anatomy. Eyes hold longer than is comfortable. Color is laid down like weather: a green so bright it hums, a blue that submerges the whole canvas and everyone sitting in it. Trained in Baghdad and working from Toronto, she has spent decades pulling apart the line between beauty and its opposite to find what is underneath.
These are quiet paintings about noisy interiors. What follows is the artist's own text.
Artist's statement
“The Table Or, as I sometimes call it: The Theater of Oddities
An open book of stories stolen from the mouths of chairs, used by passersby for a short nap, rest for tired hands, writing, or poetry. Some tables are minefields hidden in the veins of wood. When you lean close, they reveal their pain through colorful bursts that tremble in your ear like soda bubbles.
Table No. 1: An unknown lover carved deep letters into a broken heart. They left in different directions, leaving these marks on the table. Those experienced in love mock them with their stories.
Table No. 2: She said, beside an empty chair: “Please, another cup. A third or fourth, perhaps. He may be late, or may not come. But I will plant on this table a tree of coffee soaked in rain and decorated with red lipstick.”
Table No. 3: A silent conversation takes them to the edge of separation. He erases poems written in black ink and burns them with a cigarette, leaving small scars on the edge of the wooden heart.
Table No. 4: A small lake lives there. Migrating birds and fish drink from it, while purple shadows, carefully painted by clouds, remain after the tourists have gone.
Table No. 5: A musician’s fingers sleep on it. The marks of musical notes still move through the blue chair, while cappuccino travels across a map of traces.
Table No. 6: Transparent and silent, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. It receives visitors returning from war, bodies made of seashells, and fermented grapes in dusty glasses.
This is how stories move between quick and warm meals, drawn across the surfaces of tables.
Table No. 7: Two cups of cappuccino sit on a table as black as night. Stars float and shine on its surface as darkness rises, and the wood becomes a leafy tree that breathes.
This is how stories, gifts, and photographs are kept inside a box called “The Table.””
About The Artist
Zeena Sileem is a contemporary painter based in Toronto.
Trained at the Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Baghdad, she works in a figurative language of bold contour, saturated color, and layered symbolism: hands enlarged past anatomy, eyes widened past realism, birds and fish carrying messages from elsewhere. Her subjects are contradictions: love and war, music and stillness.
She has held solo exhibitions in Toronto and Baghdad and shown in group exhibitions across the Levant, North Africa, Europe, and North America since 1999.