Aidha Badr portrays the quiet transformation of the self that occurs with motherhood in her new solo exhibition I’m Never Coming Back on view until 7 November 2025 at Firetti Contemporary, in collaboration with Hunna Art Gallery.
In this exhibition, Badr paints from the threshold between daughter and mother, charting a transformation that is neither linear nor absolute. Her canvases unfold as diary pages, unguarded and unresolved, tracing identity as it slips between memory and emergence.
Earlier in her practice, Badr examined female desire and the dynamics of the daughter–mother bond, looking closely at how maternal figures shape early development. Now painting as a mother herself, she turns the lens inward. The works become self-portraits of transition: fragmented images of the artist rendered with restraint, echoing both distance and authority. Handwritten text threads through the paintings, intimate fragments of thought that reveal the quiet recalibrations of identity.
A recurring motif deepens this reflection. Horses appear across the exhibition as fragile toys, tentative foals, and finally a proud, fully realised figure overshadowing its toy likeness. In I Am Not the Same and I Am Never Coming Back, this image crystallises Badr’s exploration of change, embodying acceptance and reconciliation between past and present selves.
I’m Never Coming Back is less a statement of refusal than of recognition: that transformation reshapes without erasing, and that growth demands both surrender and presence. Through these works, Badr folds the voices of daughter and mother into one, offering an intimate meditation on the subtleties of becoming.
Location: Firetti Contemporary, Dubai, UAE.
Date: 19 September until 7 November 2025.
About Aidha Badr
Aidha Badr (b.1996, Brooklyn, NY) is an artist formally trained in portraiture living and working in Dubai. Her work unravels theories of female desire, attachment, and object relations, tracing the textures of femininity, childhood, and domestication through dreamlike compositions. Earlier paintings examined maternal relationships from the perspective of a daughter, while her current practice reflects the shifts of motherhood, offering intimate meditations on identity as it transforms. Revisiting domestic rituals and inner-child memories, Badr’s canvases capture states of becoming.