Inside the Ayyam Gallery in Dubai, Syrian artworks were drawing auction bids from collectors. Outside, the artists traded gossip from Syria and checked their smartphones for news from the civil war.
So goes the divided world for a cadre of Syrian artists brought to the safety of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by their gallery to continue their work but still remain deeply connected and influenced by the bloodshed they left behind.
The Syrian refugee diaspora - now at two million and growing - has fanned out across the region and beyond for more than two years from tent camps in Jordan to others trying to rebuild lives in cities such as Beirut and Istanbul. But the Gulf states present a paradox: deeply involved in the war as backers for the Syrian rebels yet holding firm to tight entry controls that effectively block most refugees.
The auction in Dubai's evolving art district served as a window into the effort to save one niche of Syria's artistic community from the civil war that has already claimed more than 100,000 lives.
"It's a tragedy what is happening there now, but it would be an even bigger tragedy if all this art and culture Syria has so much of is lost," says Hisham Samawi, whose Ayyam Gallery moved from Syria's capital, Damascus, to Dubai in late 2011 as the Arab Spring rebellion widened. "For us," he says, "the artists are part of our family. We had to do it. It was for us and for them."
Step by step for nearly two years, the gallery operators moved 15 artists and their families to Dubai - hiring them as employees to obtain visas in line with the UAE system that requires a person or company to act as sponsors. Meanwhile, Ayyam managed to ship about 3,000 paintings, sculptures and other works as fighting intensified in the Syrian capital.
Among those under the gallery's wings in Dubai is one of the rising stars in Syria's revolution-inspired art world, Tammam Azzam, a Damascus-born painter who has shifted to prints and multimedia work seeking to draw attention to the horrors of conflict. One piece, Freedom Graffiti, superimposed the golden-hued sensuality of Gustav Klimt's masterpiece The Kiss over a shattered and bullet-scarred apartment wall near Homs. The image became an internet sensation with hundreds of thousands of views and established the 33-year-old Azzam as one of the artistic voices of the civil war.