MOVE PAUSE RETURN : Marking 20 years

Bahman Jalali’s practice offers a vital articulation of photography as both document and intervention, situating the medium within the layered histories of Iran’s social and political transformations. Working across decades marked by revolution, war, and reconstruction, Jalali approached the photographic image not as a neutral record, but as a site through which memory is contested, reframed, and reimagined.

His early documentary work foregrounds an ethics of witnessing grounded in proximity and restraint. Rather than aestheticizing conflict, Jalali’s images insist on the quiet gravity of lived experience, attending to the aftermath of violence as much as its immediate spectacle. This sensibility evolved in his later projects, where he increasingly engaged with archival materials, most notably in the Image of Imagination series. Here, Qajar-era photographs are layered with contemporary visual interventions such as drawings, fragments, and re-photographed surfaces, in an effort to destabilize the authority of the historical image while opening it up to new temporal readings.

Jalali’s practice ultimately resists fixed narratives, instead proposing photography as a dynamic field of translation between past and present. His work underscores the instability of the archive, inviting viewers to consider how images are continually reactivated within shifting cultural and political contexts. In doing so, Jalali expands the possibilities of photographic practice in the region, positioning it as both a critical tool and a speculative medium.

Osemudiamen Ekore, Curator (Sharjah Art Foundation)

To Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, ambiguity is of the essence.
This object may resemble an animal in its stance or posture, but further inspection reveals our error. Perhaps it reads more like a riddle: What has three legs, dozens of protrusions and is brown all over?
This uncategorizable specimen, made with natural clay from Ibrahim’s native Khorfakkan, derives from the very landscape that serves not only as a source of raw material, but is also often his canvas as well as his inspiration, the primordial soup from which all his work emerges, dripping, distended, and distilled.

Rotana Shaker, Independent curator

Watching…

I am a witness.
I am grief.
I am the outcome of waiting: time passing and death approaching.

I am an eye.
The Eye of Adam, the eye of the first man, is looking at his progeny, waiting and watching them go through time towards death. A vision made out of a doily discreetly buried under circles of coffee cups.

The ritualistic process of serving guests with food and drink while a father suffers from cancer, accompanies the waiting.

A tradition, reassuring.
A common courtesy, persisting.
A feminine presence, influencing.
A transcendence of class and religion, existing.

The residue of coffee becomes a record of the present.
The act of reading the future in the residue becomes a moment of resilience and hope.
The patriarch’s passing becomes proof of lasting continuity.

Hafsa AlKhudairy, Curator, ALULA

Untitled (2026) by Haleh Redjaian unfolds between the ephemeral and the crystallized. Within the thesaurus of global modernism, its sister visual languages, formal and sensual, are found in the works of Agnes Martin, Lydia Okumura, Lygia Pape, Nasreen Mohamedi, or Bilgé. Composed of ethereal bundles of threads, it hovers between presence and disappearance, existing in accumulation yet nearly immaterial in isolation. Tapping into the primal metaphor of textile, the work presents a proto-structure of fabric. Stretched across parallel planes, the lines anticipate crossings and twists into warp and weft not yet formed, extending into an unwoven fabric that exists only in thought, a conceptual meeting point of text and textility. This suspended promise reflects on the fragile monumentality of artistic gesture. As the viewer moves, a spiraling interior illusion is activated, animating the threads and foregrounding the instability of mark and perception.

Iaroslav Volovod Curator (Guggenheim Abu Dhabi)

Folded lines fill between the moments while time-traveling to a painting by Nargess from almost twenty years ago, during a point when I have been so preoccupied with the very idea of time. Looking at the work, I find it inevitable to respond to it in light of everything that came after it, and to see how easy it is to trace her today’s drawings in her lines of the past; how her discovering of depths signals her recovering of surfaces and how her figures loop back unto themselves to free their pasts.

Ashkan Zahraei, Writer and curator (Dastan Gallery)

Most wild falcons that cross the Arab world are migrants from the circumpolar Arctic. Only 20% of the species survive their first journey. When they reach the Arab frontier, they are captured and trapped by local communities. Unable to be domesticated, the vulture enters a temporary mentoring and training relationship in which humans tame it by enhancing its motor, sensory, and muscular dispositions. The goal is to cultivate the bird’s hunting capabilities so that it can source wild game for humans: the protein-rich Houbara Bustard. This is achieved through tassels, leashes, jesses, vocals, perches, and especially, hoods, which are expanded upon as conceptual prostheses and garb in Hoda Tawakol's artwork.

After this mentoring exchange, the falcon is released back into the wild, much stronger and more agile, to return to its original nest in the Arctic to spawn the next generation.

Ahmad Makia, Writer and publisher

Decidedly abject, the picture is difficult to look at as asparagus entangles and assimilates with chest hair--indeed, the body is an awkward assemblage. As our sensory experiences of reality move away from our body and into a hyper techno-semiotized realm, the body becomes an ungainly material excess with its role as an interface with the world, increasingly obsolete. Yassin's photographic series uses exotic produce to gesture towards the idea that a foreign body can ultimately conceal itself by taking on the material textures of the new environment. The new body, a lot like land and produce, is mined and harvested with regimes of capture: through data, computation, and accelerationism. When we develop systems of artificial intelligence that reproduce us, the body becomes a mirror of our own disavowed vulnerabilities–a porous threshold standing in the way between alterity and interiority. If a chip can nestle itself in your brain and reshape cognition, why the hell wouldn't an exotic fruit append itself to the side of your face or sprout out of the crown of your head.

Ruba Al-Sweel (Writer, artist)

Reflection is the return of light, and in that return, a  production of an image is born- one that mirrors a tangible reality, onto a felt surface, which pursues the distortion of that image, through the rulership of light. Reflection, is also a deep mental state, which attempts to unpack and make sense of particular experiences and in this, the act of remembering and recalling, redraws a merged memory borrowing from the variety of lived and shared experiences that helps one understand it.It is in this that Alia Lootah’s paintings hold their weight. Rooted to place in various geographies of gardens, skies and seas- the paintings trace light that moves between the gaps of contrasting naturescapes to a rhythm reinterpreted through reflection, creating an image divided between movement and stillness, differentiation and similarity. 

Munira Al Sayegh, Independent curator and founder of Dirwaza Curatorial Lab

Side by side, Sarah Brahim presents two films in the work He said, we must forget. On the one hand, memory is forming, trying to remember or perhaps forget. The other attempts to trace or interrupt—the artist’s marks and gestures overlaid on the film negatives. Together, the films hold each other in quiet tension, neither resolving or answering.

Using collected moments filmed over a year, Brahim explores the tenuous relationship between memory and imagination. What does it mean to construct and to unfold one’s self?

Passing scenes melt into each other, at times within a glance—her hands reveal themselves, measuring the space between the material of the physical world and the self. Through the materiality of film, Brahim attempts to capture and override memory itself; although fleeting, the feelings still linger.

Sara Bin Safwan, Curator, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Co-founder and curator, salasil