24/04/2026
Home can be a place. It can also be a memory, a language, a gesture, or a journey. Sometimes, home is something we leave behind. Sometimes, we begin to build home again — with people, through meetings, conversations, solidarity, and care.
With gratitude to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, Little Bird Place Gallery welcomed Syrian artist Yamen and Ukrainian art professor and land artist Olga, together with her daughter Darina, an animation student, for a meeting with Axel Morel, artist and curator of the exhibition 4 HANDS | mirror. For us, the gallery briefly became a shared home for stories, questions, and new connections.
4 HANDS | mirror brings together 14 artists and creates a journey between Bulgaria, France, Italy, Thailand, Canada, and Afghanistan. Across these different places, voices, materials, and traces, the exhibition asks how art can hold memory, carry movement, and help us imagine home as origin and self, but also as recovery, discovery, and a new beginning.
Yamen arrived in Bulgaria last year. He first learned to paint in Syria with his artist father, and is now transforming the walls of a café he is opening in central Sofia with his murals. Olga teaches future artists at New Bulgarian University, where Darina is studying animation. In different ways, the sense of home is also shaped by art, learning, and contribution.
Solidarity with displaced communities means believing in a world where every person forced to flee can build a better future — and can find safety, dignity, and belonging again. Hope, like home, is something we build together.
We thank Axel Morel for the network of dialogue and solidarity he has created through 4 HANDS | mirror, and UNHCR Bulgaria for helping us widen this circle with Yamen Zahraa, Olga, and Darina.
4 HANDS | mirror: exhibition by Axel Morel
