Adel Abidin returns to painting with the solo exhibition What Remains curated by Tamara Chalabi, at Galerie Tanit in Beirut. The artist turns to the horizon as both a visual anchor and a metaphorical threshold. Across seascapes and fractured terrains, he explores how catastrophe inscribes itself upon memory, landscape, and collective consciousness.
In the triptych Drift, a wrecked ship unfolds across three canvases, its fragments dispersed yet tethered by a continuous horizon. The movement of refugees through this scattered debris transforms the horizon into a fragile site of persistence. Other works build upon these themes: Displaced entwines spectral blue forms, fractured terrain, and a glowing tent that doubles as refuge and mirage; Metamorphosis dissolves clear boundaries, evoking the instability of survival and renewal; while Aquarium stages catastrophe within an aqueous chamber, where industrial remnants drift in suspended isolation. In Above the Abyss, figures appear suspended at the edge of an altered landscape, caught between escape and peril.
Though not bound to a single geography, the works resonate with the memory of Iraq; the light, the shifting relation of water and land, and the enduring marks of destruction. These echoes culminate in the sculptural installation What Remains, where fractured materials hover between ruin and endurance.
Abidin’s return to painting unfolds as both testimony and meditation. His landscapes ask what survives collapse, offering memory not only as a repository of loss, but as a generative force for imagining futures.
Location: Galerie Tanit, Lebanon.
Date: 10 September – 23 October 2025.
About Adel Abidin
Adel Abidin (b. 1973, Baghdad) is a Helsinki-based artist whose work interrogates history, politics, identity, and cultural alienation through irony and critical reflection. Moving fluidly across video, installation, and now painting, his practice explores conflict, displacement, and memory. Since representing Finland at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), he has exhibited internationally, with major presentations at Kiasma, Mori Art Museum, Mathaf, and the Sharjah Art Foundation. His works are held in significant collections worldwide. Winner of the Ithra Art Prize (2023), Abidin continues to examine power and consumerism while expanding his practice through a renewed engagement with painting.