Grey Noise, Dubai

19/05/2026

The importance of staying quiet

In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s, and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981), and Iqra Tanveer (b. 1983).

Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.

A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.

5. Fahd Burki II.b
May 16 – July 31, 2026

The penultimate exhibition in The importance of staying quiet draws to a close a multi-part dialogue about spatiality and abstraction in the practice of Fahd Burki. The forms in ‘Fahd Burki II.b’ have now fully escaped their wall-bound surfaces and shapeshifted into the three-dimensional.

Six wooden configurations meet us, some solid, others disguised as a single-piece unit, but in fact composed of conjoining parts. The works are not immediately recognisable or particularly organic: Seed may be an obvious exception, both by name and shape, while Hearth reveals as decidedly corporeal, its three parts locked together in a tight embrace. Non-erotic, still sensual, not necessarily human. Aero could be a tail fin or a rudder of a flying object, but it feels equally like an elongated teepee. Either representation, from colliding worlds, is a possible visitor from earlier drawings by the artist.

The wood gradients change tonality, from the warm heaviness of the cedar to the cooler lightness of the beech. Varying thicknesses of white gesso appear on some forms, draping one work lightly like gauze and another thickly like limewash. Thinner yet are the optically illusionary pale blue lines that run down the multiple frames of Gate as it spans out like collapsed architecture. Above them all towers the serpentine totem, Old Bone, watching. From one angle Old Bone faces Kiva (as it did in the Lahore presentation), and from another, it stands in front of it. No one side is correct, as is no one meaning. But it allows two simultaneous truths to exist at the same time.

All the sculptures in the show were originally created for a solo presentation in Lahore for an exhibition programme that runs out of repurposed post-war barracks. The low ceilings, curved white walls, and independent rooms of that space dictated the development of the works and the tension between them.

Shown together here for the first time, this presentation looks at the physicality of the indeterminate forms that populate the artist’s works on paper and canvas. Geometrically abstract and stripped of representation, the visuals emerge from two-decades of a studio-based practice gripped with the turn of material, surface, colour, and light.

Part of the many discussions we’ve had about exhibiting the sculptures is what it means to plan spatially, and to rethink the works beyond their first staging. There is a heightened awareness that the lines, forms, and voids of this space, and the area around the objects, become an invisible extension of the work itself.

The layout of the gallery often imposes its length as a nave, with the final wall becoming an altar of sorts. Do we play with this, against this, or pretend it doesn’t exist as a question at all? Many things happen in this show that may not be obvious at first, or even at all. Bastion, for instance is a ghost of the past exhibition warming the room for its companions.


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The importance of staying quiet will conclude in September 2026 with its sixth and final exhibition ‘6. Group Show’. The presentation will bring in a selection of artists from Pakistan, and its diaspora, including those not represented by Grey Noise.


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About the Artist

Fahd Burki (b. 1981, Lahore, Pakistan / Lives and works in Pakistan) graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore and received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Selected exhibitions : Old Bone, THE BARRACKS Art Museum, Lahore, Pakistan / daydreams, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE, / Wheredoiendandyoubegin - On Secularity, 9th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Gothenberg, Sweden / Folds of Belonging, Brisbane / Social Calligraphies, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland / 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea / The Missing One, OCA, Oslo, Norway / Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh / Carré d’Art - musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes, France.

23/04/2026

The importance of staying quiet

In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s, and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981), and Iqra Tanveer (b. 1983).

Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.

A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.

4. Fahd Burki II.a
April 18 – May 09, 2026

Originally conceived as a two-part exploration – Fahd Burki I and Fahd Burki II – the project has been rearticulated to allow for a more gradual unfolding.

Fahd Burki II.a, the fourth exhibition in The importance of staying quiet, operates as a passage within this trajectory. Extending the dialogue initiated through painting in Fahd Burki I, this presentation assembles works on paper, canvas, and wood, pulling through the two-dimensional language and foreshadowing its shift toward the three-dimensional.

While the spatial studies of the paintings were anchored in amorphous, inanimate volume and depth, the works on display here turn toward contour, elevation, and depressions, explored through both actual and implied relief. From the surface outward, the edges crawl, fold around the frame, and consolidate into a single wooden form that anchors the centre of the presentation. The remaining tonally minimal, monochromatic works hold the space in a light yet concentrated tension.

The image remains void of organic reference, yet a monolithic presence begins to assert itself.

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The final presentation in the series, Fahd Burki II.b, opening May 16, will move fully into the three-dimensional.

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About the Artist

Fahd Burki (b. 1981, Lahore, Pakistan / Lives and works in Pakistan) graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore and received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Selected exhibitions : Old Bone, THE BARRACKS Art Museum, Lahore, Pakistan / daydreams, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE, / Wheredoiendandyoubegin - On Secularity, 9th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Gothenberg, Sweden / Folds of Belonging, Brisbane / Social Calligraphies, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland / 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea / The Missing One, OCA, Oslo, Norway / Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh / Carré d’Art - musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes, France.

09/02/2026

The importance of staying quiet

In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s, and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981), and Iqra Tanveer (b. 1983).

Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.

A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.

3. Fahd Burki I
February 08 – April 07, 2026

The third exhibition in The importance of staying quiet opens with ‘Fahd Burki I’, a new body of paintings that continue an excavation of the image and bring forward speculative structural and spatial studies. Focusing entirely on two-dimensional works, this presentation explores depth, texture, and curvature, drawing at times from architecture and at others from nature.

The exercise, for us, was to pivot the conversation this project has initiated over the last five months. Moving from a two-part exploration of Lala Rukh’s visual vocabulary and use of retinal memory, we turn to how her much younger peer, Burki, has been exploring a similar distillation of the image through a decidedly different language. Both knew each other well and even exhibited together in group and two-person presentations, and so it becomes significant to this project to see how we could bridge the kind of abstraction that these artists employ.

Like Lala Rukh, Burki too is occupied deeply with the treatment of the surface, whether paper or canvas, and the use of monochromatic lines and washes. Both practices are slow and considered, and share a meticulous attention to detail. Unlike Lala Rukh, though, Burki’s interest is anchored in constructing volume and depth towards amorphous (but slightly familiar) forms, which then often float weightless on shadowy, airy, obscure, spatially indeterminate planes.

Burki’s imagery and style are often characterised as unpinnable because they refuse obvious -isms. Which largely is true. However, it is the organic evolution of his lines and forms, that move from totemic and structural to non-representational to complete absence, constantly, that defy specific labelling.

At present, his large and unworldly monoliths have receded in the background to reveal much smaller representations of brutalist forms that sometimes feel as though they are skittering like multi-legged beings. The visuals feel inferred, or on the verge of forming, rather than fully illustrative or fully anthropomorphic, and lean heavily into the structural. The forms feel architectural, but they are scaled down to the size of tools, parts, relics, or organisms. They read less like buildings and more like components, as if architecture has been dismantled into units that no longer know how to assemble themselves.

There are no traces of habitation. No doors that invite entry. No scale cues that accommodate bodies. These are spaces uninhabitable but not ruined. Stepping back, this body of work, together, feels dark, devoid of human life, almost death-like, but not wretched.


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Fahd Burki I is the first iteration of a two-part dialogue that opens with two-dimensional paintings, which will be subverted completely in the second presentation as the work moves into the three-dimensional and a more obvious realisation of Burki’s spatial studies. That dialogue, which opens on April 14, will not necessarily provide a resolution but rather a separate complication of the artist’s aesthetic concerns.



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About the Artist

Fahd Burki (b. 1981, Lahore, Pakistan / Lives and works in Pakistan) graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore and received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Selected exhibitions : Old Bone, THE BARRACKS Art Museum, Lahore, Pakistan / daydreams, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE, / Wheredoiendandyoubegin - On Secularity, 9th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Gothenberg, Sweden / Folds of Belonging, Brisbane / Social Calligraphies, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland / 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea / The Missing One, OCA, Oslo, Norway / Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh / Carré d’Art - musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes, France.

18/11/2025

The importance of staying quiet

In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s, and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981), and Iqra Tanveer (b. 1983).

Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.

A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.

2. Lala Rukh II
November 16 – January 17, 2026

The second exhibition of The importance of staying quiet completes the two-part observational inquiry into Lala Rukh’s photographic practice.

Lala Rukh I presented a selection of photographs from the artist’s archives during her years at the University of Chicago (1974-76). Its speculative framework helped us to stage the evolution of Lala’s photographic sensibility, as she refined her sense of composition, framing, and perception.

For Lala Rukh II, we wanted to see how this inquiry could be extended to works from the late-1970s onward, showing how her practice moved toward abstraction. The exhibition builds parallels across different bodies of work, tracing how Lala both used and broke down photographic technique, the visual, and the conceptual into photo-documentation, unique photo works, video, and drawing.

Lala often returned to the idea of the coastal sites long after she photographed them, and past impressions resurfaced to find new form. These revisitations were less about replication than the remembering of a moment. This retinal memory, gathered through decades of looking, re-emerges in many works, and is catalogued painstakingly in a labyrinthine system of numbering and labelling that only she could fully decode.

The shift between still and moving image, print, and drawings mirrors her exploration of how light, memory, and duration register differently through material – all elements she refined through her photographic practice.

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Note:
This exhibition is accompanied by a series of standalone notes positioned throughout the space. These concise annotations offer focused observations that expand on the materials, processes, and ideas informing this authored framework.

About the Artist

Lala Rukh (b.1948, Lahore; d. 2017, Lahore / Lived and worked in Lahore, Pakistan) studied art at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan (MFA) and University of Chicago, USA (MFA). She taught for 30 years at Punjab University, Department of Fine Art and the National College of Arts where she set up the MA(Hons) Visual Art Program in the year 2000. After retiring from teaching, Lala Rukh devoted her time in her studio in Lahore and to activism. She was amongst the foremost feminist activist artists of South Asia.

A selection of exhibitions includes: Göteborg International Biennial For Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden / In Our Own Backyard, Asia Art Archive, Hongkong / Lala Rukh: In the Round, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE / After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia / Notations on Time, Ishara Art Foundation, UAE / Line, beats and shadows, Kiran Nadar Museum Art, India / Luogo e Segni, Punta della Dogana, Italy / Artist’s Rooms: Lala Rukh, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE / Peindre La Nuit, Centre Pompidou – Metz, France / Documenta 14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany / For an Image, Faster Than Light – Curated by Bose Krishnamachari, Yinchuan Biennial, Yinchuan, China / The past, the present, the possible – Curated by Eungie Joo, Sharjah Biennial 12, Sharjah, UAE.

19/09/2025

The importance of staying quiet

In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s, and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981), and Iqra Tanveer (b. 1983).

Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.

A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.

1. Lala Rukh I
September 18 – November 05, 2025

The first exhibition of The importance of staying quiet opens with Lala Rukh’s photographic archives from her years at the University of Chicago (1974–76).

While pursuing a second master’s degree at nearly thirty, Lala already had a trained eye, but these images reveal the sharpening of her framing and the intent of her gaze. This exhibition revisits that gaze, bringing together early works that carry a cinematic sense of composition before arriving at her later language of minimal abstraction.

Photography was central to Lala’s life yet largely unseen by the public until Sagar (2017) offered a first glimpse into how her retinal memory developed. The exhibition included photographic documentation of rivers and seas across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Burma, shot during her travels between 1992 and 2005. Each composition follows a specific format, where water bodies, the horizon, and the sky feature in varying proportions. The absence of people and objects is consistent. Among the countless images she took, Lala’s selection for the exhibition revealed solitude and an intimacy with the waterscapes, preserving fleeting moments in time.

The Chicago photographs, however, are different. They are not minimal or abstract. They contain architecture, people, animals, objects, and most importantly, construct narratives. Additionally, the ‘set’ and direction recall filmic technique. Where a person or an animate body is absent, the scene is weighted with arrival or departure. These photos document Lala’s new surroundings and influences. The artist was broadening her perspective, and encountering art, music, and politics that encouraged experimentation. While these elements are present in the photographs, they are not the main subject of this presentation. Instead, the elemental techniques of printing – resized reproductions of film negatives, and pairing frames in diptychs, triptychs, and other polyptych sequences – are centred.

Lala’s works on photo paper and other forms of mixed media printing are more clearly offshoots of her photography practice. But her characteristic affinity for rigour, design, and precision can also be seen at play here. Together they foreshadow the ways her later works were composed, executed, and presented.

These images mark an artist testing how vision and perception could be distilled into structure, laying the foundations of a radical practice. Nearly half a century later, they allow for a nuanced reading of an artist whose early experiments in framing, sequencing, and looking shaped her language of abstraction. Connections between these photographs and her later works, particularly in their use of colour and compositional discipline, will be explored in Lala Rukh II, the second part of this exhibition.

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Note:

Although Lala produced these images with intention – prepared and perhaps shown during her university years – she never formally presented them as artworks. The editors of this presentation therefore frame them carefully as reflective studies within her archive, read in retrospect as a way to trace her process.



About the Artist

Lala Rukh (b.1948, Lahore; d. 2017, Lahore / Lived and worked in Lahore, Pakistan) studied art at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan (MFA) and University of Chicago, USA (MFA). She taught for 30 years at Punjab University, Department of Fine Art and the National College of Arts where she set up the MA(Hons) Visual Art Program in the year 2000. After retiring from teaching, Lala Rukh devoted her time in her studio in Lahore and to activism. She was amongst the foremost feminist activist artists of South Asia.

A selection of exhibitions includes: Göteborg International Biennial For Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden / In Our Own Backyard, Asia Art Archive, Hongkong / Lala Rukh: In the Round, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE / After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia / Notations on Time, Ishara Art Foundation, UAE / Line, beats and shadows, Kiran Nadar Museum Art, India / Luogo e Segni, Punta della Dogana, Italy / Artist’s Rooms: Lala Rukh, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE / Peindre La Nuit, Centre Pompidou – Metz, France / Documenta 14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany / For an Image, Faster Than Light – Curated by Bose Krishnamachari, Yinchuan Biennial, Yinchuan, China / The past, the present, the possible – Curated by Eungie Joo, Sharjah Biennial 12, Sharj

17/06/2025

Fatima Haider
Figure, Ground
June 15 – August 9, 2025


Fatima Haider’s practice is rooted in an ongoing engagement with abstraction. Each work begins from a point of reference - whether a form, an image, or a specific colour. Initially grounded, only to become increasingly unmoored through the process of making.

A recurring motif in her work is the interplay between camouflage and nature, the organic and the industrial. These seemingly opposed forces are folded into one another, generating both visual and conceptual tension. The horizontal line functions as a foundational element. Establishing orientation, marking a horizon, and suggesting both a beginning and a boundary. From this point, resistant spaces emerge: spaces that are confrontational, unyielding, and deliberately withholding.

Haider’s surfaces alternately absorb and reflect, often invoking flatness and negating one-point perspective to evoke the fleeting nature of perception. Her works gesture toward moments of passing, of glimpsing something in motion only to leave behind a residue that lingers beyond the moment of encounter.


About the Artist

Fatima Haider (b. 1984, Lahore) is a visual artist and educator based in Lahore, Pakistan. She holds a BFA from Beaconhouse National University, Lahore and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Haider’s practice is rooted in painting, complemented by over a decade of commitment to fine art pedagogy. She currently teaches at the National College of Arts, Lahore.

17/04/2025

Majd Abdel Hamid
On White
April 15 – June 4, 2025


Material Tension

In the work of Majd Abdel Hamid, embroidery is an act of thinking. A relentless process that initially chased perfection but, over time, tempered into something more fluid, more accepting of unravelling. A practice that is still compulsive but that now resists the limitations of finality.

Over the last decade, Majd has sustained an ongoing habit of white-on-white embroidery. These works, a small selection of which surface in On White, trace a journey spanning more than a hundred pieces, each the result of long hours of meticulous labour.

The repetition of white thread stacking over a white surface is like the slow growth of a ghost garden, silent but persistent. In this, there is a kind of psychosis, an unfolding where time stretches and collapses in the rhythm of the needle moving in and out of fabric. The work demands looking, looking again, looking closely, looking with the body. Shadows form where threads rise, textures emerge only when the light shifts.

These small works evade imposed meaning. Guided by instinct rather than premeditated structure, each stitch reads like a gestural stroke in a painting. Spontaneous composition and the physical negotiation of material move through a register resonant with archetypal abstraction.

Though not conceived as a single body of work, these fragments exist apart from Majd’s more visual imagery, which has included forms, figures, personal and political motifs. While intrinsically tied to him, these elements are absent from the non-representational white-on-white works, making this body a distinct and separate archive of his imagination. Shown together for the first time, they catalogue the minimal imprint of hands releasing energy into being.


— Saira Ansari, March 2025


About the Artist

Majd Abdel Hamid (b. 1988, Damascus) is a visual artist from Palestine, currently based between Beirut and Paris. He graduated from Malmö Art Academy, Malmö, Sweden (2010) and attended the International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah, Palestine (2007-2009). Majd Abdel Hamid’s solo exhibitions were presented at Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2025), Cell Projects, London, United Kingdom (2025), Signal, Malmö, Sweden (2024) and Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, Brussels, Belgium (2021). His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (2024); Phenomenon, Anafi, Greece (2024); Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy (2024); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2024); Prix Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France (2024); Art Explora, Photograph Pavillion (2024); Hirafen, Tunis, Tunisia (2023); Kyiv Biennial, Vienna, Austria (2023); Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, UAE (2022); SMAK, Ghent, Belgium (2022); Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon, France (2022); Cité International des Arts, Paris, France (2021); Ruya Maps, Venice, Italy (2019); Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon (2019); Krognoshuset, Lund, Sweden (2016); Valencia Institute of Modern Art, Valencia, Spain (2018) and Halil Saakini Cultural Center, Ramallah, Palestine (2018).

06/04/2025

Quddus Mirza on Fahd Burki

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https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/1297907-burki-at-the-barracks?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR7ixGy39Nq25QhZOXP4lpxdMVTkWJar_UicUag_q3rA1mOrjqpbv0Ma2o8RsQ_aem_LjiUMlsl9vnFbOX2OUPLRQ

07/02/2025

15/11/2024

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros
Five consecutive dreams, five suns, and a garden
November 14 – January 11, 2025

On a summer day, a foreign daily worker, a mason, is hired for one day's work.
In lieu of his daily labor, which entails constructing concrete structures, he is offered a day of rest in an orchard garden belonging to the artist, situated in the Lebanese mountains.
He is simply requested to enjoy his time in the garden, alone, liberated from labor, with the freedom to engage in any activity he chooses during the designated working hours and to consume the fruits he desires from the existing trees.
Lunch is provided, along with water, and a portable charger for his cell phone.
He is encouraged to take a nap after lunch.
He is given a white bed sheet to cover himself during his nap and to protect himself from the sun.
At the end of the day, after being remunerated, he returns the white bed sheet to the artist.
The dreams and hopes impregnated in the white bed sheet are then covered with a fluid mixture of cement, water from a local source, and ashes from the news of that day.
The same experience is repeated five consecutive working days with five different workers.

About the Artist

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros born in Lebanon / Lives and works between Beirut, Paris.

In his work invisibility is charged with intimate, geographical and historical layers; finding poetic lines that extend beyond the realm of existing speculations and realities.
For H. Boutros, each exhibition is a new geography that reformulates reality.

H. Boutros was a resident at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (France) and a researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (The Netherlands). In 2020, the S.M.A.K. in Belgium hosted his first institutional exhibition in Europe, “The Sun Is My Only Ally”, later presented at the Contemporary Art Center La Criée (2022) in France. His first monograph, jointly prepared by S.M.A.K Ghent and La Criée centre for contemporary art, published by Mousse Publishing was released in 2022.

Previously shown at: The 12th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey / Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France / Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy / Centre Pompidou - Metz, France / S.M.A.K. Museum, Gent, Belgium / Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, France / Home Works 8 and 9, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebnanon / CCS Bard College, New York, USA / 3rd Bahia Biennial, Salvador, Brazil / 1st Yinchuan Biennale, Yinchuan, China / CCA, Warsaw, Poland / More Konzeption Conception Now, Morsbroich Museum, Leverkusen, Germany / Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE / Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon / La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, France Marres, Maastricht, The Netherlands. A permanent installation ‘Sueur d’étoile’, that he realized with the French étoile dancer Marie-Agnes Gillot, inaugurated in 2016 remains on view at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France.

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros’ works are in the collections of S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent / CNAP, Paris, France / Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE / SAMoCA Saudi Ministry of Culture.