Are your memories of me enough for you? Solo Exhibition at 421 Arts Campus, Abudhabi 
30th January - 4th May 2025
Exhibiton programme

The Maghreb Issue, Canvas Magazine, Issue 117
Art Africa Magazine, Issue 25, Exhibition Review and interview by Brendon Bell-Roberts
Symbolic exploitation of the Barbary lion and music against injustice by the National
Are your memories of me enough for you review by Rawaa Talass for Canvas

Exhibition text
The exhibition critiques and engages with the production of simulacra, emphasizing the ways iconography has been both preserved and restored across different periods of history. By doing so, it raises crucial questions about how these 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. By preserving these icons we are perpetuating a cycle of influence, allowing them to shape cultural and political narratives into the future.

This dynamic echoes 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. These objects are no longer alive but exist in a sterilized form, a preserved fragment in the repository of colonial and scientific institutions. As Baudrillard would argue, these simulacra, emptied of life yet hyper-visible, turn the very pursuit of knowledge into an act of simulation rather than discovery.

Central to the exhibition is the narrative of the Barbary lion, whose physical extinction and symbolic immortality serve as an illustration of this phenomenon. Once native to North Africa, the Barbary lion was hunted into extinction, becoming a casualty of both ecological destruction and colonial assertion of dominance over nature. Yet, even in death, the Barbary lion lives on as a potent symbol of imperial power. The exhibition uses 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. By framing the lion’s image as a symbol of both destruction and immortality, 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 (2025)
Copper plate etching on a museum sign podium

tooth and a folly (2025)
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 (2025)
Salt sculptures