Firetti Contemporary show connects winter of despair with spring of hope

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Firetti Contemporary @ Alserkal Avenue is presenting The Unseen Presence, a collective exhibition featuring the works of Ahmad Tallaa, Bassam Kyrillos, Besher Koushaji, Eyad Jouda, Hikmat Naeem, Ibrahim Hamid, Kamal Al Zoubi, Mahmood Al Daoud and Suheil Baddor (Feb. 12 – Apr. 12). Through painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the show examines the invisible forces that shape history and identity by exploring themes of memory, migration, resilience, and cultural transformation.

Inspired by Nizar Qabbani’s poem Balqis, it interrogates subjects such as exile, war, and the irreversible shifts wrought by displacement. Qabbani’s verses, which mourn not only a loved one but also a homeland, sets the mood: “The sweetest homeland,/One can’t stand,/Living in such a homeland./One can’t stand,/Dying in such a homeland.” The words indicate the paradox of memory — how displacement coexists with longing and how a place remains deeply cherished, though terribly transformed. But The Unseen Presence explores the idea further, not content just to portray individual experiences. It moves beyond personal mourning and nostalgia to look at larger histories existing as fractured realities, shifting identities, and evolving landscapes.

A composition by Suheil Baddor.

Some works embrace nostalgia, while others question its fragility. Some reconstruct the remnants of a vanished past, while others examine the tension between survival and erasure. Ahmad Tallaa and Suheil Baddor investigate the landscapes of migration and the caravan of emotions it generates. Tallaa captures the unseen presence of comfort even in dire circumstances, depicting sanctuary as a cherished place, though delicate and fleeting, where existence is lived in spaces between nostalgia for the past and the uncertainty of the future.

The muffled palette reflects the emotional burden of displacement, while moments of warmth even in that condition, suggest hope. In contrast, Baddor explores the unseen presence of waiting, portraying figures suspended in time, their identities in flux between what was and what is to be. The layered, abstracted compositions evoke exile as an unresolved state — where bodies are dispersed, and the search for belonging never ends. Similarly, Ibrahim Hamid and Baddor focus on the experiences of displaced women. Baddor’s figures mirror the shifting nature of identity and memory, while Hamid preserves figuration, using bold brushstrokes to emphasise the emotional toll of displacement.

Portrait by Ahmad Tallaa.

Eyes in both cases serve as portals to silent narratives, revealing grief and the will to overcome it. While Baddor leans to abstraction, Hamid balances it with realism, emphasising the endurance of those who carry not just personal loss, but the load of collective displacement. The instability of memory — both individual and collective — forms the foundation of Besher Koushaji and Hikmat Naeem’s works. Koushaji examines the unseen presence of memory, constructing portraits where faces appear and dissolve, representing the way memories swing between clarity and fade-out.

The compositions speak of the fragility of identity in times of turmoil. Naeem expands the theme, taking it beyond the human figure, exploring the unseen presence of lost cities, where architecture dissolves into abstraction. His compositions depict urban spaces on the verge of disappearance, with fading structures that evoke painful stories of war, migration, and elimination. While Koushaji focuses on how individuals carry history within them, Naeem reveals how cities too, are affected by the passage of time and loss.

Eyad Jouda and Bassam Kyrillos examine physical and psychological endurance. Jouda’s wire-bound sculptures embody the presence of a silence which screams. His precariously poised figures, living or dying in worlds falling between vulnerability and safety, speak of the price of migration, where survival is a brittle equilibrium between resistance and surrender. Kyrillos delves into the unseen presence of sacrifice, merging human forms and architectural decay. His haunting imagery presents figures that appear to emerge from — and disband into — eroded buildings, embodying suffering and survival.

Eyad Jouda's work titled Compulsive Equilibrium.

While Jouda’s sculptures symbolise dissent through balance and motion, Kyrillos’s works depict destruction, displacement and transformation through decay and fragmentation. Mahmood Al Daoud also engages with loss and renewal with his work reflecting the unseen presence of transfiguration, depicting cycles of death and rebirth. He reimagines memory as something that both disintegrates and yet lives in different forms; ruination is not absolute, but rather an essential part of remaking. While Kyrillos anchors his work in the decay of built environments, Al Daoud evokes the movement of time through abstraction, revealing how history leaves imprints long after physical markers have faded.

Unlike the other artists, Kamal Al Zoubi approaches nostalgia playfully, engaging with it in a way that bridges past and present. His LEGO-Inspired Arabic Tower transforms childhood memories and linguistic traditions into sculptural forms, reinterpreting Arabic calligraphy through a contemporary lens. Where other artists explore remembrances through decay, exile and struggle, Al Zoubi captures it through joyful abstraction. He maintains a connection to the past, where heritage is not something mourned, but is something continuously reimagined.

Through these different yet interconnected perspectives, The Unseen Presence invites audiences to engage with broken realities, the detritus of identity, and histories that refuse to fade – now very common occurrences. It asks: What does it mean to face ruination and rebuild from ruins? How do we carry the unseen weight of history? Can a homeland be reconstructed — not just physically, but with the original content of cultural and emotional memory? The exhibition is not just about loss — it is about resilience too. Even in destruction, something remains - a trace, a shadow or an unseen presence, that shapes the way we live in this world.