Location: Canada
Ralda Burhan was born in 1979 in a rural area near Damascus, Syria. Raised in a conservative environment, she carved her own path through education, graduating in 2004 from the University of Damascus with a degree in Arabic Language.
She later moved to Dubai, where she worked as a journalist and editor for several newspapers and magazines.
Following the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011, Ralda was unable to return to her homeland. The conflict deeply impacted her life, resulting in the loss of family members and friends through death and forced disappearance. Like many Syrians, she endured the profound pain of displacement as her family became scattered across multiple countries.
In 2018, she sought refuge in Canada, where she faced the challenge of rebuilding her life while carrying the weight of memory and loss. After finding stability, she began a journey of self-discovery. In 2021, she turned to painting for the first time in her life, having never held a paintbrush or practiced drawing before. With no formal artistic training, painting became an unexpected language through which she could express what words could no longer contain.
“Painting became a form of healing for me a way to express and share my trauma. Over time, I began to paint not only what I had survived, but the strength that helped me overcome it. Now I paint victory, the will to heal, and the ability to renew and transform.”
Ralda works in a symbolic Cubist style, exploring themes of women, strength, renewal, and survival. Her paintings delve into the inner worlds of women spaces shaped by struggle, resistance, and transformation. Through recurring symbols and layered compositions, her work reflects an ongoing dialogue between past and present, memory and identity.
Through her practice, Ralda invites viewers to witness not only pain, but also the resilience and power that can emerge from it an expression of the enduring strength of women across time.
A selection of symbolic figurative paintings exploring women, identity, survival, healing, and transformation. Through elements of Cubism and Expressionism, these works reflect the journey from fragmentation and loss toward strength, renewal, and self-reclamation.
Do we see ourselves in the other ?
Are we searching for lost fragments of who we were ?
Is this a journey toward identity or is it the beginning or the end ?
“A Thousand Survivals and a Night ”
The heroine of this painting is Shahrazad. She reclines with quiet grace beneath a golden crescent, holding her book as one holds onto life itself.
In her fragmented face, stories gather not as brokenness, but as strength that knows how to survive.
Each page she reads delays the end, and every gaze she casts writes a new beginning.
Here, storytelling is not for pleasure… but for survival.
This painting, “Lit Light,” radiates with both power and grace. A regal figure in rich blue stands tall, her golden adornments shimmering like history reborn. She paints the sun itself onto the canvas, as if giving light a new beginning. Each brushstroke beams with warmth, turning darkness into hope. “Lit Light” is not just a painting it’s a visual hymn to illumination and creation.
How many times have we imprisoned ourselves, while freedom was already in our hands?
Transformation is not always loud; sometimes it arrives quietly, in a silence no one can see. Only a butterfly’s wing whispers that change is inevitable
Some words linger within us long after the voices that spoke them have faded. Reclaiming begins when we erase what was never ours to carry and slowly uncover the self that existed before we learned to doubt it.
Somewhere within us, a child is still waiting on the road we once left behind. Healing is not returning to become who we were, but reaching back with tenderness, taking that small hand, and walking forward together.
“Reflection”
“LIT LIGHT”
“Beyond the Self”
“Metamorphosis”
“RECLAIMING”
“FOUND YOU”
