Current Speed: Vian Sora-Outerworlds

Speed Art Museum is proud to announce Vian Sora: Outerworlds, a multi-venue, mid-career survey of painter Vian Sora (b. 1976, Baghdad). Organized jointly with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Asia Society Texas in Houston, this exhibition will assemble approximately 20 of Sora’s major works, charting her growth as an artist over a period of seven years (2016-2024). Outerworlds is Sora’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and will tell the story of how her multivalent paintings abstractly channel the tumultuous events of her life, ancient Mesopotamian history, Western art history, and Iraq’s diverse natural landscapes, including its deserts, rivers, and archeological sites. Vian Sora: Outerworlds will debut at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in June 2025, traveling to the Speed Art Museum in October 2025 and Asia Society Texas in April 2026.

Born in Baghdad, Sora had her first solo exhibition in Iraq in 2001. She lived through the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent Insurgency. She later left Iraq, sought refugee status for her family in the United Arab Emirates, and then eventually resettled in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2016, Sora turned to abstraction to process all that she had lived through from Iraq to the settlement in the United States. Her painting has transformed into a high-powered, bodily, and dynamic practice of controlled chaos. Her canvases reflect an array of radiant paints that are splashed, poured, and sprayed onto the canvas. Pigments run, accumulate, and clash, resulting in upwards of fifty layers of oil and acrylic paint in a single work. “For Sora, the multilayered effects of her paintings give a concrete form to the chaos of life and out human efforts to control it,” said Raphaela Platow, Speed executive director. “Her paintings reference both the realm of biology with its cycles of growth, decay, and evolution, as well as the tumultuous history of her homeland, and inevitable recurrence of wars, violence, and eventual regeneration. It is our great pleasure to celebrate an international artist at the Speed who has found fertile ground for her artistic journey here in Louisville.”