Can I Hug All These Flowers? A Conversation between Ali Eyal and Ala Younis

On the occasion of their two-person exhibition at Onomatopee, Eindhoven, curated by Silvia Franceschini, artists Ali Eyal and Ala Younis sat to chat about the works they presented and the narrative connections that emerged through their curation. The exhibition runs from 6 February to 10 May 2026.

Ala Younis (AY): During the installation at Onomatopee, and later during the opening tour, it was intriguing to see how the narrative could flow from your work to mine and back. Our approaches to detecting and representing elements from history differ, yet they intersect in unexpected ways: the war, the looting of Baghdad’s museums, the strong presence of female protagonists during times of distress, the different ways that architecture haunts both of our practices. Buildings on Haifa Street in Baghdad were active construction and art exhibition sites, and yet they could also appeal as incubators of everything that sits in our emotional landscapes. My approach focused more on architecture and architects – on the people who build structures, and how colleagues used these buildings during periods of development, but also sanctions and disorder. 

Ali Eyal (AE): It’s a strange coincidence. The buildings you exhibited your work on were the same buildings I used to pass every day for five years on my way from home to the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. These mid-rise buildings, on Haifa Street, I used to notice the bullet marks on them all the time, and I would wonder: why aren't they repaired? The remains of 2003 war and violence that followed in Baghdad, it was as if they were the only buildings never erased or restored. I was looking at a map of car bombings that took place in Baghdad during that period and was thinking how I lived through these events and still alive. 

AY: Oh that map, I had a version of it in my Plan for Greater Baghdad (2015); I came across it while searching for Baghdad gymnasium. I was trying to identify the area around it to see whether the building saw any destruction post 2003. I included the map in my work, but I abstracted it heavily and removed the red colour because it felt too violent.

AE: I look at it and there isn’t a place without a mark. And Baghdad took the heaviest hits, because it’s the capital.

AY: Tell me more about your paintings. For instance, From then on, doves scare me (2024) depicts a large, reclining figure that looks like a landscape with a head in the centre. The head is opened like a terrain, revealing scenes of domestic life, scattered furniture, and quiet devastation. Tiny figures move across the body, suggesting fragments of lived experience or collective trauma. The setting merges rural and urban elements under a dramatic, smoky sky, hinting at conflict. Objects like a sandal, a radio, and animals evoke everyday life disrupted. The exaggerated anatomy and layered imagery create a surreal, autobiographical narrative where personal history, war, and childhood memory intertwine within a single, vulnerable body.

AE: At first, I was trying to create something personal – something rooted in my own world. But what happened was that the work unfolded naturally, and it became tied to things from my childhood. I had an obsession with reading – especially fictional stories. I loved reading so much that I would even read the instruction leaflets that came with medicine. At the same time, there was this idea of refusal. How my uncle refused to show his face so I could draw him. And so I have to draw him from behind, and this feature became part of the rhythm of the work. All these elements became like small organisms, almost like bacteria, that affect the work in subtle ways.

From there, I began expanding. Sometimes the perspective becomes imagined; I try to see other spaces within a larger world, or even imagine that a simple surface might contain a hidden world we’re unaware of. In one painting, there’s just a head resting on a hand, I didn’t need the full body. The question was: how can the body move within the entire visual field? So the hand seems to drift within a space, and that space opens onto another world, quiet, almost suspended. A world within a world.

I have also a strong interest in visual composition, which sometimes feels almost like magic; not everything is under control. I might control the outline, but other elements appear unexpectedly, like the Apache helicopter up here in the sky, which I hadn’t planned. There’s also the image of a mother holding her child – they’re actually the same figure repeated in the black area inside the hair of the head. Meanwhile, there are two gardens, one from a memory I have of Los Angeles, where my friend David Horvitz fed crows peanuts, and a garden from my childhood, and in that scene, it’s as if I’m building or driving a bus. There’s a sandal placed inside the windshield wiper, a radio, and my siblings sitting in the back – just heads, no full bodies. Once, by accident, I stepped on a chick I had bought and it died. That’s one of the most disturbing memories I have, and I inserted that in the work too. 

AY: So they are like nightmares?

AE: They follow the logic of movement. I try to support what is in motion, to animate it in a way. Sometimes very simple things, like the movement of pigeons in the green area under the hair, carry a different rhythm or a possibility of being. When I return to those memories now, they feel like a kind of revelation, as if I'm closing my eyes and imagining half of it. For me, a work never really ends, it’s always part of a larger narrative. All the works are connected; they form a collective memory. Each work is like a page, and the whole thing remains open.

AY: In my project, the sanctions period is a crucial reference. And as much as growing up in the 1990s was a harsh thing to live – even for a Jordanian in Amman, experiencing events at a remove – I find there is still so little documentation of what daily life actually felt like during that decade. So I appreciate the small gestures people share about it. That period was severe, especially following the Gulf War, and it changed markets in ways that are still underexplored. Some flowers, for instance, disappeared from our garden and from the market entirely. I notice you drew some flowers close to the edge in this work.

AE: During the sanctions period, I was addicted to eating flowers. I enjoyed their taste – partly because I was a child, and it was a curious thing to do, but also because food resources were scarce. They tasted like honey. I spent a lot of time in the garden too, observing larvae, ants, everything. If you left me alone, you’d find me just watching quietly, magnifying glass in hand. The garden was large – really large – it even had a palm tree, probably the only one in the area. We lived in the southern part of rural Baghdad, close to Babylon.

AY: When we were searching for a title, you suggested Can I Hug All These Flowers? and then added, almost casually, that you had been addicted to rose petals during the sanctions. That remark stayed with me. Since 2021, I have been following the appearance of cut flowers in diplomatic and commercial relations between different political camps. I was thinking about how certain flower varieties disappeared from the Jordanian market in the 1990s – dahlias, carnations, gladioli – while beginning in 1991 they emerged as a regulated export business in the Gaza Strip. Flowers were appearing and disappearing along political and economic lines. The sanctions period is a crucial moment in this research, a time when entire fields could disappear and reappear somewhere else, when flowers shifted from ornament to sustenance. 

AE: If I wanted to hug them, their thorns could hurt me. 

AY: The hug feels like the burden of having to hold all these fragments – of history, failed solidarities, political manipulations – without rejecting them or turning away. You open your arms as if to hug the piece, 6x9 doesn't fit everything and. (2021). You layer drawing, photography, and handwritten text to construct a fragmented archive of memory and loss. A distorted, visceral body – split open and rendered in ink –appears both anatomical and landscape-like. The image is physically manipulated, folded and overlaid with envelopes and documents, while at the centre, a handwritten note held by your hands anchors the work in testimony, as if bearing witness to a huge event that resists containment. The note reads: 

‘This is a photograph of my father's car which was burned by the American forces, umm wait, I have to change the accents and angles of my letters. This photograph was taken by our lawyer and my father's relative Salah Al-Ghrairi, who was murdered, due to his work with the Farm government, by Al-Qaeda at the doorsteps of the court building. We headed out with the lawyer, I and my mother, when I was thirteen years old, and went to the American Military base near our house in Al-Rashid. I will never forget how the American soldier yelled in my mother's face: “We have nothing to do with that! It could have been Blackwater or the Dutch Forces. Now get out! We don't compensate terrorists.” I left with my mother and the lawyer devastated and heartbroken. The size of the photograph's back is not enough for my letters. Memory from 2007.’

There's a reference here to the Dutch forces. And I’m presenting, in this same exhibition, a mock-up of buildings constructed by the Dutch contractor Bredero between 1980 and 1984, still known today as the ‘Dutch Buildings’. They rise along Haifa Street, and one of its residents was a female architect who lived on the 15th floor, self-studying deconstructivist architectural styles that hadn’t yet been built in Baghdad. When she later taught these styles to her students, she used examples from poetry to explain them – a gesture I find deeply creative. And then, during the tour, I noticed the word ‘Dutch’ appear again in your handwritten note. Your handwriting shakes as you write it. It’s set against a drawing of the back of a head being opened, almost split. What’s happening there?

AE: I was trying to alter the form, almost like opening it up, like a large bag. I treat the head as if it were clay. This scene is based on a real location, the same corner where the car burned. I drew two walls, two windows, and this is exactly where the car was. This connects to an archival image, the only one I have left for the car. Imagine that the photo carries the sound of my father's car burning. I overturn it, so drawing became a substitute for the image. I draw my hand, place it on the photograph, press my finger onto it, and redraw that same hand in ink as a kind of affirmation. It’s like an act of resistance, to prevent forgetting, even in the absence of an actual image.

That black dot, the act of placing ink on my finger, comes from a sense of helplessness. There was no evidence, no document, nothing to trace my father who disappeared in 2006. We went to every hospital, searched everywhere, but there was no trace. So my mother took me to visit a psychic who would put ink on my finger, ask me to focus, close my eyes, and describe what I see – as if summoning something. But in the end, there was nothing – just darkness. I was too shy to say that I saw nothing, so I described to them things from my imagination. I guess this is why if there’s a clean, smooth surface in a painting, I might deliberately add a black dot or a scratch. None of this comes from nowhere.

AY: What about the video, The Blue Ink Pocket, and. (2022)? You made it about your commute to the informal workshops of Sada, where a small group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds would meet an international artist joining via the internet. You wrote about navigating car bombs on the way there, arriving with eyes puffed up as though from jungle mosquitos. I could also imagine how, when a lecturer asked you about the thousand-year-old Battle of Karbala, they perhaps had no sense of how dangerous it had been for you just to show up that day. The video shows you gathering parts of a painted canvas – as if, in depicting the body, it had scattered illustrated limbs into unusual hiding places.

AE: We had sessions with guest instructors who would join us via Skype, because no guests could come in person. The work became tied to an inner space, as if the video were not directly about me, but about another figure named Ali. There’s the idea that artworks travel, that the artist can depict themselves, or parts of their body, and move through space with them. That message emerges through insects, as if they represent a kind of re-entry or return. It reflects what we went through, how we would move from home to the institution, driven by a desire to learn and to encounter forms of education that differed from the traditional academy. We were seeking something beyond academic study. At that time, we didn't really think about the danger – whether we might die or not. Explosions had become part of daily life, something routine.

AY: What made you so determined to go, despite everything?

AE: Because it offered something completely different. We had been trained to produce work without really questioning it, without digging into what lies behind artistic practice. It often felt like artists were only displaying their technical abilities, without depth. But Sada was different. For me, it became like an inheritance, something essential. We were drawn to every opportunity, every event, every gathering. We wanted to live. That drive outweighed the fear, even the possibility of death.

AY: When did you decide to become an artist?

AE: I don't really know – since I was a child. If you ask a child what they want to become, they might say a doctor or an engineer. I always said: a painter, even before I understood the word ‘artist’. I was always drawing. I started with cartoon characters, then gradually moved toward political drawings. I drew countless portraits of Saddam Hussein, so many that I eventually memorised his face and no longer needed a reference. Drawing was encouraged at school; we were even given certain privileges. We would copy caricatures from newspapers and political magazines. That’s where it all began, I even held a small exhibition at school, and the art teacher would support the work and frame it.