It Never Leaves You 2024

The following work is part of the "It Never Leaves You" solo exhibition at Galerie Kuchling, Berlin. May 31 - July 23, 2024.

“It Never Leaves You” explores Maria Kassab’s family history through an exchange of letters across generations. Revisiting the correspondence her father sent to his parents from Beirut in the 1970s, Kassab writes back to him from contemporary Berlin, creating a dialogue between past and present, memory and lived experience. Through letters, family photographs, painting and photography, she traces the lasting effects of political upheaval and displacement on the idea of home. Moving between Beirut and Berlin, the work intertwines personal and collective histories, questioning how the past is remembered, reconstructed and passed on. Taking its title from Einar Schleef’s novel Gertrud, the work reflects on what persists across time: the traces of home, the weight of history and the things that never quite leave us.