Ashes and Seeds
Throughout art history, landscape has never been a neutral backdrop. It has always been a witness and an active participant in the stories humans tell whether that's about belonging, loss, memory, resilience, and survival.
The Romantic sublime of the nineteenth century showcased vast landscapes that were imbued with spiritual and emotional gravitas, while the Land Art movement of the 1970s enabled earth and landscapes to become both material and memory, allowing artists to repeatedly communicate with nature to explore questions that extend beyond aesthetics.
In the MENA region, this relationship between land, memory, and identity takes on a charged significance. For Palestinian artists such as Sliman Mansour, elements like the olive tree, stone, and soil have become enduring symbols of rootedness, resistance, and resilience. The landscape is not only a place where history occurs but is a part of the history itself, where the land carries the traces, memories, and experiences of those who have lived on it, been displaced from it, returned to it, and have fought to preserve their connection to it.
Lebanese postwar artists such as Walid Raad and Etel Adnan similarly reveal how landscapes can bear the scars of conflict, displacement, and exile. Their practices suggest that land is impacted by human experience. In itself it absorbs the mark of violence and separation, while continuing to hold the possibility of remembrance and reconstruction.
Land is not only a site of beauty, but an archive of violence, migration, grief, and survival. In the works of Nahla Tabbaa, Raya Kassisieh, and Yasser Al Omari, symbolism, field drawing, and ecological encounters become ways of listening to what landscapes might tell us. Their practices invite audiences to consider the possibilities that land itself remembers, that soil, plants, rocks, and living ecosystems may hold histories that exceed the limits of human memory and understanding.
Within this context, Ashes & Seeds asks us a fundamental question: What truths does the land carry?
The exhibition resonates with contemporary posthuman and ecological thought, challenging the concept that nature exists as a passive environment that surrounds human life, while instead proposing a more interconnected understanding of the world, where humans are only a part of a larger network of living and non-living relations.
This idea resonates within the philosophy of Ikhwan al-Safa, whose writings emphasized the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and the cosmos. Within this worldview, nature is not merely a place to be observed or controlled, but an active, alive, moral and spiritual participant in existence.
Ashes and Seeds therefore becomes more than just merely an exhibition of artworks, but a living archive, one in which grief and resilience are inscribed in the very soil of the planet. The ashes speak to what has been burnt, lost, displaced or buried, while the seeds speak to what regenerates, persists, and refuses to disappear.
Nature, in this sense, is not unalive, but rather witnesses and remembers. Beneath the surface, it continues to carry the traces of what has happened, while also holding the possibility of what might grow next, no matter what remains.
