EXHIBITIONS
Saleh Barakat Gallery presents False Witnesses, a solo show by the influential Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi (b. 1939), whose iconic work is inspired by the long and shared history of the Arab world, from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day. Originally scheduled for October 2023, then rescheduled for September 2024, this exhibition is a biting critique of the corruption endemic to all political systems, seen through the prism of recent events in Iraq. Although the main body of works directly reference the October Revolution (2019–20), the destruction of Mosul (2014–17) and Aleppo (2012–16), and the sectarian divisions in Baghdad (2003 onwards), they are part of Azzawi's ongoing endeavour to highlight injustice in general and champion the voices of all victims of oppression through his work. The artist has also added a display of charcoal drawings from the celebrated series Night of Extermination (2023), which were made at the start of the genocide in Gaza, and his new daftar (artist’s book) called Gaza: The Pain that Opened My Daughter’s Eyes (2025), to emphasise the fact that the violent oppression of Palestinians is tantamount to injustice against us all.
In October 2023, during the first weeks of the genocide in Gaza, Dia al-Azzawi made a series of twelve charcoal drawings called Nights of Extermination. In these works, centred on the eyes of the victims, aerial aggressions take the form of vicious birds of prey, billowing smoke and unknown objects raining from the skies, while scattered body parts are heaped in the confusion of widespread casualty and death. The innocent victims stare directly out of Azzawi’s drawings in obvious distress, entreating the viewer’s sympathy at the unfairness and hopelessness of their desperate fate.
In a 2025 daftar (or artist’s book) called Gaza: the Pain that Opened My Daughter’s Eyes, Azzawi overlays faces of innocent victims in black and white with red paint to represent both their suffering and the secondary agony of witnessing atrocities through journalism and social media, an experience of painful awakening that he observed in his own daughter, which is further signified by artist’s own handprint of testimony (also in red paint).
These recent works about Gaza can be viewed as a continuation of Azzawi’s ongoing series Land of Darkness (1991–present), which began with a set of charcoal drawings about Iraqi civilians and a diarised daftar called Book of Darkness, during the 1991 Gulf War. At the same time, they are also part of Azzawi’s continued efforts to highlight injustice against Palestinians, which can be seen in his work from the early 1970s onwards, as a symbol for the unfairness of global inequality and all corrupt political systems: this criticism is at the heart of the works displayed in the solo exhibition ‘False Witnesses’.
The Five Elements
24 September - 31 October, 2025
This garden and its environs, lying to the South of Lebanon, is the intimate space of Lebanese artist Rola El Hussein. In her vibrant renderings the place appears as a sanctuary, colour fields moving softly but surely into an increasingly abstracted world.
Always finding a focus in the fundamentals of her daily life and routine, El Hussein’s view is subtly re-focused, now considering only five of the elements that surround her: sun, clouds, sea, sky, and grass, the intimate characters and daily scenes so evident in her previous work receding as her vision shifts towards the formal elements of what she sees.
Despite her recent foray into a more abstracted reality, there is a hovering quality to this body of work, which seems to flicker between the concrete life of her garden and a more abstract world perhaps at its root. In this, Hussein simultaneously ties the viewer to her place and also moves away from the representation of any particular place. There is a tension in the space between the sun and the circle.
To describe the world is not so simple as it sounds, to connect the forms of the world with the experience of living in that world, in that particular place, in this time. Here, there is a quiet tension between a relationship with a specific place, and an awareness of the universality of form, a reminder that place is moving, and yet is here under our feet, is solid and yet can be abstracted, at a remove.
Rola El Hussein, born in 1978, graduated from the Lebanese University of Fine Arts in 2003. Her most recent solo exhibition ‘Because the grass doesn’t think about its garden’ was held at Agial Gallery in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2024, and she has also participated in a number of group exhibitions and art fairs. Rola El Hussein is also a writer and has published two novels and four poetry collections, as well as a number of short stories.