Vian Sora: Outerworlds

Asia Society Texas (AST) is proud to announce Vian Sora: Outerworlds, a multi-venue mid-career survey of internationally renowned abstract painter Vian Sora (b. 1976, Baghdad). Organized jointly with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Speed Art Museum, the exhibition assembles major works charting Sora’s artistic development over the past decade. Outerworlds is her first solo museum exhibition in the United States and explores how her multilayered paintings abstractly channel the tumultuous events of her life, ancient Mesopotamian history, and Iraq’s diverse landscapes, including its deserts, rivers, and archaeological sites. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue published with Inventory Press.

Vian Sora: Outerworlds debuted at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on June 22, 2025, before traveling to the Speed Art Museum, and opened at Asia Society Texas on April 15, 2026. The Asia Society Texas presentation is the largest on the tour, featuring new work by Sora alongside loans by John Chamberlain (1927–2011) and Etel Adnan (1925–2021) from the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, respectively, fostering a cross-generational and cross-cultural dialogue on abstraction.

Born in Baghdad, Sora presented her first solo exhibition in Iraq in 2001. She lived through the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent insurgency before seeking refugee status for her family in the United Arab Emirates and eventually resettling in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2016, she turned to abstraction as a means of processing these experiences. Her paintings evolved into a dynamic practice of controlled chaos, with radiant layers of oil, acrylic, spray paint, pigments, and inks accumulating into richly textured surfaces. For Sora, these layered compositions give tangible form to the disorder of life while reflecting cycles of growth, decay, conflict, and regeneration.

Describing her process, Sora remarked in a recent Observer interview: “I initiate each of my works with the canvas flat, then I utilize fast-drying spray paint, acrylics, pigments and inks…creating passages…like ventricles, sometimes tissue. I then use oil to control the disarray…that attempts to constrain chaos, when life regenerates from detritus.” According to Owen Duffy, Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Asia Society Texas, “Sora’s paintings brim with dense visuals that can be understood as spaces of visual conflict where hues and colors collide, absorb into one another, and bleed.”

Beyond their painterly processes and evocations of war, Sora’s works are infused with references to mythology, history, and the geography of ancient Mesopotamia. These resonances emerge through titles such as Abzu, the Sumerian subterranean freshwater source; Hanging Gardens, recalling the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; and Dilmun, the ancient civilization along the Persian Gulf associated in Sumerian mythology with the god Enki and the realm of the dead. Her paintings thus carry traces of Iraq’s millennia of history as well as the archaeological landscapes that preserve its cultural memory.

“I hope this exhibition will illuminate the struggle, courage, and dissonance continuously faced by war survivors that exist between worlds,” says Sora. “As displaced people and immigrants constantly strive to make sense of our new orbits, these paintings depict a journey through distant time and space in order to reach safety.” 

Vian Sora: Outerworlds is organized by Asia Society Texas, Speed Art Museum, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Owen Duffy, Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Asia Society Texas; Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art, Speed Art Museum; and James Glisson, Chief Curator, Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Vian Sora: Outerworlds is presented by Shazma and Arshad Matin.

Special support for the exhibition across all three venues is provided by the Great Meadows Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation. Free Thursday exhibition admission presented by Dr. Asha and Farid Virani.

Vian Sora: Outerworlds is displayed alongside a solo exhibition of Nevine Mahmoud's stone sculptures throughout Asia Society Texas's Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building.