Exhibiting in the UAE for the first time since 2013, Leila Heller is proud to present a semi-retrospective of Persian-American artist Reza Derakshani in “EMANATIONS,” including works from the artist’s personal collection, the Hunting Series, and Garden Party Series. In his paintings, Derakshani recalls forgotten tales and symbols of Iran’s cultural heritage, at a time where traditions and practices are under threat and often outlawed. Through a rich iconography drawing from medieval Persian poetry, classical literature, miniature painting, and sacred architectural sites laden with meaning, Derakshani’s work celebrates both ornamentation and color fields, as the artist finds a space for figural representation in abstract aesthetics.

Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery.

It takes approximately ten minutes for the photoreceptive cone cells in the eye to adapt to the dark. This is roughly the running time of the looping audio narration in Divecha’s Gallery 354 (2019), the immersive installation that sets the central premise to Vikram Divecha’s solo-exhibition Towards Opacity. We enter a barely lit photography darkroom – as our pupils adjust, we are made cognizant of the ways in which vision is inherent to subjectivity. Guided by Divecha’s voice, we partake of an aesthetic experience that unfolds at the creeping pace of what is known in ocular biology as “dark adaptation.”

This is not an ordinary sea; this is a shoreless sea. Here swimming doesn’t end and drowning is possible as well as separation from the loved ones. Waves rise and clash fiercely, helicopters pass over boats and refugees flee from bloody wars. Stolen intimate moments amid an atmosphere full of panic and hope is still possible. In Shoreless Sea, Tayseer Barakat’s works manifest as an account on refugees’ desperate journeys to cross the Mediterranean to Europe in search for a normal life. For Barakat, the Mediterranean was part of his life; he himself is a refugee who lived near the shores of Gaza as a child and by the shores of Alexandria as an undergraduate student. Yet, the Sea became colder since then. It also became merciless and its appetite grew stronger. Suddenly, it hid its beaches, leaving people on board to wander in desperate search of ways to escape.

Confessions of the Wait is a new solo presentation by Muzzumil Ruheel.
Waiting; the inaudible playground for the mind’s festival. It holds an interesting complexity of time with an unexplainable sensation and a mysterious tranquillity. Coupled with idle moments slipping away, the yearning for its ending carries a mystifying bittersweet beauty. Lost within this whirlpool of thoughts, feelings, self-reflections and recollections; one is overwhelmed and the thoughts turn into moments of joyful reminisce or burdens on one’s consciousness making them lose their presence in reality. However, sometimes there passes a moment of such gravitas that it becomes an everlasting instance of epiphany and leaves immeasurable impact.

Courtesy of 1×1 Art Gallery

Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to present Melis Buyruk’s debut in the UAE, with the solo show “Habitat,” on view from January 20th to March 12th 2020. The exhibition showcases nine porcelain works by Buyruk, where a ceramic topography of intricate flora and fauna are encased in wooden boxes, and granted their own habitat. In a mastery of porcelain, the traditionally feminized and overlooked art form associated with domestic life is reinterpreted as a medium that points to bio-futurist tensions. Marking Buyruk’s first exhibition in the broader MENA region, “Habitat” presents the first viewing of the Turkish artist’s large-scale works, which comes as a response to Leila Heller Gallery’s Dubai exhibition space. Allowing for the deeper immersion into Buyruk’s intricate and delicate porcelain world, the larger works creates for a more commanding visual confrontation with Buyruk’s hybrid flower forms.

Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery

Etel Adnan wished this exhibition as a splash of hope amidst the current severe political and economic crisis Lebanon is witnessing. With this in mind, the gallery has produced the show against all odds, a gesture of cultural resilience that is meant to contribute, on our modest scale, to the sustainability of the arts sector in Beirut. The title of the exhibition, The uprising of colors, therefore refers to art’s capacity to bring colors into a grim quotidian. The exhibition proposes an overview of Etel Adnan’s multidimensional practice: her small format paintings fill the space; and with simple lines and colors, her compositions flow naturally, painted in one sitting with a knife palette. The spontaneous act results in work that is never contrived, and that radiates joy. A series of leporellos bridges between her writings and her visual art work: they unfold, filled with words alternating with abstract colors and shapes.

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

till life and Plastic Dreams, is Mohammad Alfaraj’s (b. 1993 in AlHassa) first solo show, curated by Mayssa Fattouh for Athr Gallery, and timed to coincide with the art week, 21’39. The exhibition is a metaphor on the state of Alfaraj’s hometown and the world, an exploration of co-habitation of humans in a natural habitat, showing local self-contained agricultural practices confronted with mass extraction and extinction by the hyper industrialized era, radically disrupting and increasing the feeling of a precarious present. Based on the premise of the ongoing civilizational paradigm shift we are partaking in, with the backdrop of weather and climate influencing our existence, ranging from daily life in a rural setting to apocalyptic visions of the future where the capitalist machine is the usurper of nature. Here, Alfaraj reveals his implication in these debates through the instinctive act of storytelling in a sensorial installation across different bodies of works, comprising of a sculptural installation, photography and photomontage, sketches, a sound installation and two projections.

Serwan Baran’s recent body of work extends the formal and political preoccupations of Fatherland, the solo exhibition with which he represented Iraq at the Venice Biennale in 2019. In addition to a large series of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, he has produced a work of staggering proportions to complement his equally monumental painting from the pavilion, entitled The Last Meal. In his current exhibition, Baran provides a counternarrative to the artworks he was obligated to produce as a war artist in the Iraqi army. While he was instructed to represent the nation and its leaders as beautiful and triumphant then, he now seeks to show the destruction that is absent is such state-mandated political propaganda.

Courtesy of Saleh Barakat Gallery

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, along with Alexander Gray Associates, New York and gb agency, Paris, announce Hassan Sharif: I Am The Single Work Artist, a retrospective of Hassan Sharif’s work curated by Hoor Al Qasimi and Krist Gruijthuijsen at KW Institute, Berlin, Germany. In spring 2020, KW will present the first major retrospective of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) artist Hassan Sharif in Europe. Sharif was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century from the Middle East. He is discussed as a leading force in the field of Conceptual Art, which rethought a conventional understanding of time, space, form, and social interactions.