The Santa Barbara Museum of Art announces Vian Sora: Outerworlds, the first solo museum exhibition in the United States dedicated to the Baghdad-born, Louisville-based painter. The exhibition marks a pivotal moment in Sora’s career, situating her dynamic, multi-layered abstractions within a broader institutional and historical frame.
Organised in partnership with the Speed Art Museum and Asia Society Texas, Outerworlds covers nearly a decade of Sora’s practice (2016 – 2023), presenting 20 major works that channel the personal and political landscapes she has navigated. From the layered histories of ancient Mesopotamia to the aftermaths of war and exile, her paintings hold space for rupture and renewal. Through poured pigments, sprayed surfaces, and sedimented layers of oil and acrylic, Sora offers a visual language shaped by displacement and the cycles of growth, decay, and resurgence.
The exhibition’s title derives from two works produced during a Berlin residency in 2021; a period of global stillness that turned her gaze inward. Yet Outerworlds remains outward-looking: its forms resonate with the mythologies, geographies, and unresolved inheritances of Iraq. Works such as Abzu, Hanging Gardens, and Dilmun evoke the spiritual terrain of Sumerian belief systems, while others gesture toward biological flux or planetary drift.
With this institutional debut, Sora joins a growing chorus of diasporic Arab artists receiving overdue recognition. Outerworlds opens in Santa Barbara before travelling to Louisville and Houston, bringing Sora’s visceral, radiant works into new and necessary conversations across the United States.
Location: The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, USA.
Date: 22 June until 7 September 2025.