In the spring of 2018, Ghaleb Hawila, along with curator Rania Mneimneh and filmmaker Margaux Chalançon headed to Yahya refugee settlement in Bekaa Lebanon and met ten children for a painting art intervention…

Migrating Letters is a collaborative artwork between the artist and refugee children where play and art intermingle in beautiful splashes of paint and calligraphic verses. The verses are taken from a poem by famed Lebanese poet Elia Abou Madi and are a juxtaposition of both a collective recognition of suffering and a collective force of resilience, from Lebanon, to Syria, to the world.

Ghaleb draws these verses calligraphically over giant canvases painted on by the children and then crops them into more than fifty pieces. The intention is for these canvases to spread to new places, for the calligraphic letters to migrate, carrying the voices of migrant children into the homes of the audience.