Dubai · 21/09/2026
Ahmad Tallaa: The Living Archive
Sand-built portraits, sculptures and artist books on the marks that experience leaves behind
Ahmad Tallaa's The Living Archive begins with handmade artist books made from recycled materials and raw canvas, then expands into large-scale portraits at the centre of the show. Built from layers of sand collected in the UAE, chalk powder, pigments and acrylic, their dense, almost sculptural surfaces seem excavated rather than painted — faces emerging from within the canvas, with cracks, scars and accumulated marks as evidence of time's passage. A tile installation of recycled wood panels with faint facial features extends across the gallery wall, while sculptures in sleeping postures hold the tension between formation and collapse, presence and dissolution. The exhibition proposes that what experience leaves behind is not absence, but presence transformed.
