Massoud Hayoun: Between Broken Promises, Harissa

Larkin Durey is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by Massoud Hayoun. This is the artist’s first show with the gallery and his first exhibition in the UK.

Born in Los Angeles, USA, Hayoun draws upon his Tunisian, Moroccan and Egyptian heritage to explore notions of belonging, identity and systems of power. A celebrated investigative journalist, writer and painter, the artist has a keen eye for those who “are frequently disregarded”.

The death of Hayoun’s grandparents, who raised him and to whom he was especially close, led him to interrogate his Jewish Arab roots, culminating in the critically acclaimed memoir When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History, published in 2019 by The New Press, New York – an intimate tribute to the artist’s family and an attempt to articulate and explore the Jewish Arab identity. For Hayoun, “Politics are personal - and the more people benefit from certain oppressive power structures, the less likely they are to notice…the degree to which all politics are personal.” In a similar sense, his two poetic novels, Building 46 and Last Night in Brighton, both published by Darf Publishers, London, use the framework of the ghost story to examine sexuality, body image and the North African diaspora.

As a journalist, Hayoun was drawn to “help uplift voices — not just those of analysts and academics, but on many occasions of people who are systematically silenced.” Personal loss, the pandemic and the example of his grandmother taking up drawing late in life, inspired Hayoun to focus on painting, a language he has always enjoyed as an immediate, visceral way in which to tell stories. As such, his vibrant portraits celebrate the full gamut of society: sex workers, convicts and migrant labourers jostle with political and cultural revolutionaries, as well as personalities from the artist’s childhood, including his beloved grandparents. For Hayoun, painting can bring people back from the dead and with them, the full drama of life.

Hayoun was born in 1987.