Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
Firetti Contemporary has announced The Living Archive, a solo exhibition by Syrian artist Ahmad Tallaa (Sept. 21 – Nov. 11); the exhibition brings together large-scale portraits, sculptures, a tile installation, works on paper, and artist books in the most comprehensive presentation of Tallaa’s practice to date. “There is a particular kind of knowledge that cannot be spoken, only carried,” says Celine Azem, curator. “It lives not in language alone, but in the body. It is seen in the way a person holds their shoulders, in the lines that deepen around the eyes, in the gestures that return long after the circumstances that shaped them have passed. This is the knowledge Tallaa’s work is concerned with: not the record of what happened, but the residue of how it survived.”
The Living Archive considers the face as a site of lived experience. Tallaa asks: what does time leave behind, and what happens to those traces as they are carried forward? Rather than treating the archive as a fixed repository of the past, he approaches it as something living - altered by time and continually transformed through the bodies and materials that carry it. The exhibition begins with Tallaa’s artist books, including handmade objects constructed from recycled materials, raw canvas, pigment and gesture that form the conceptual foundation of his wider practice. Displayed on plinths and open for visitors to move through, they occupy a space between notebook, diary and experimental record.
A single mark may occupy a page; elsewhere, paint sits beside a scratched line or unfinished form. Nothing is fully resolved. The books reveal a process of observation and continual revision, allowing forms to emerge from the material, rather than beginning with a conclusive, predetermined image. Alongside, smaller studies on paper appear too. They retain the message, at different speeds and scales. Together, the books and works on paper lead into the large-scale portraits at the centre of the exhibition. They are not portraits in the conventional sense, since there is no individual named, no likeness captured and no fixed psychology rendered. Instead, the face becomes what Tallaa describes as “a trace of human experiences, a document, and a witness to a specific time.”
Built from layers of sand collected in the UAE, chalk powder, pigments, glue and acrylic, the works become dense, almost sculptural. Faces appear as though excavated rather than painted; features surface and dissolve, while forms unite only to fragment again. The sand carries a particular geographical significance. Gathered in the UAE, Tallaa’s present home, it brings the material of his current environment into works shaped by memory and experience of his original home. Past and present are therefore held together not only conceptually, but materially.
Tallaa describes the face as “neither a victim nor a survivor”, but as a witness. His figures bear evidence of pressure without being reduced to suffering; their fissures and eroded features register what they have passed through, but preventing that history to define them entirely. This idea extends across the gallery through a tile installation made from recycled wood panels. Using sand, acrylic, charcoal and pigments, Tallaa works faded, near-erased facial features into each surface. Individually, the panels appear as fragments; together, they form a field of presences on the edge of clarity. With each repetition the face changes, suggesting that deterioration need not mean disappearance, but transformation.
Tallaa’s sculptures carry these concerns into three dimensions. Fissured surfaces and eroded features echo the material vocabulary of the paintings, while many of the heads appear in sleeping positions. Sleep resists a single interpretation; it can hover between withdrawal, profound rest, silence and transience. Balanced atop scored cylinders and rough stone forms, the heads occupy a similar threshold: between formation and collapse, emergence and dissolution. Central to the work is the experience of living under the shadow of conflict. The instability, displacement, and sensory texture of wartime Damascus have left a deep imprint on the artist’s visual language: surfaces that recall rubble and ruin, figures that dissolve before they can fully cohere, marks that speak of both presence and erasure.
Tallaa’s practice is rooted in the physical act of making — he fabricates many of his own tools and materials, treating the studio process as creative inquiry rather than mere artistic production. His works bear visible evidence of this approach: layered surfaces eroded and rebuilt, forms that hover between emergence and disappearance, compositions shaped by pressure, time, and the resistance of reality. He does not have the mind map of a completed piece of work. Rather, forms and shapes emerge even as the work progresses.
Writer Veronica Azzari opines that “The Living Archive does not present the past as something finished, but as a living presence that continues to shape the present. Tallaa suggests that the archive is not what we preserve on a shelf, but what we continue to carry within ourselves ... For him, an archive is not a collection of documents preserved on shelves, but a living organism in constant transformation. Every experience leaves a mark, every wound reshapes matter, every passing moment rewrites identity.” Born in Damascus in 1994, Tallaa studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus and received the Spring Annual Exhibition Award from the Syrian Ministry of Culture for Best Artwork in both 2017 and 2019. He is currently based in Sharjah, UAE.