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.

For his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, the painter, sculptor and photo artist HIROYUKI MASYAMA focuses on perspectives from the Free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg, in an attempt to redefine the relationship between space and time. The conceptual approach of Hiroyuki Masuyama is always based on his interest in crafting an image, as well as in the beauty of the original subjects. His work is characterized by a romantic approach paired with deconstruction of the objects: for a new series of works, he repeatedly traced the contours of the shadow of individual flower petals and of a tree leaf with a pencil, at specific times.

Courtesy of  Sfeir-Semler 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.”

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.