Are your memories of me enough for you? Solo Exhibition at 421 Arts Campus, Abudhabi
Photographs: Ismail Noor at Seeing Things Studio
30th January - 4th May 2025
Exhibiton programme

Exhibition text
Alla Abdunabi’s first solo exhibition presents a new body of work that critiques and engages with simulacra, a concept used in philosophy and cultural studies to analyze how symbols shape our perceptions of what is accepted as “real.” The work emphasizes the ways that iconography has been preserved and restored across different periods of history. By doing so, it raises crucial questions about how symbols not only endure but gain new significance as they are continually reintroduced into contemporary contexts. This restoration process, rather than simply reviving a historical moment or object, often reinforces the power structures embedded within them. Through the preservation of these icons in art, museums, or public spaces, Abdunabi investigates their influence and how they shape cultural and political narratives into the future.

This dynamic echoes Philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s notion that for ethnology or anthropology to exist, its object must metaphorically “die.” In this context, the once culturally embedded object becomes a frozen artifact, stripped of its original function or meaning, yet continues to exert influence as a simulacrum. The exhibition uses the Barbary lion’s duality, its mortal extinction and its symbolic resurrection, to explore how colonial violence often outlives the physical acts of subjugation, continuing to exert influence through symbols and representations. This reanimation mirrors broader practices of colonialism, where the tangible effects of violence and exploitation are enshrined into the very institutions that continue to shape cultural memory today. The exhibition questions the ethics of restoring and displaying objects that carry colonial histories and what “care“ means in these contexts. 



List of works:

Love that Reassembles Fragments (2024)
Ceramic sculptures made using casts of the artist’s baby teeth on a slab, metal armature

Delacroix’s Foreign Bodies (2024)
Oil paint on wood panel, 50 x 25.4 cm

Lion Attacking a Dromedary (2024)
Copper plate etching on a museum sign podium

tooth and a folly (2024)
Baby tooth from Father’s collection of artist’s baby teeth in metal container, glass, mirror, 8.5 x 6cm

taste sweet, taste bitter (2024)
large-scale concrete relief sculptures

Yet, I endured for you (2024)
Salt sculptures