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Silence

Ghada Al Qasimi

This exhibition explores the quiet presence of absence, the spaces where life once lingered.

It begins at home, in intimate corners, on surfaces shaped by time. Silence gathers there, revealing what remains behind. From these still beginnings, it moves outward.

It reaches villages forgotten by wind and memory, crosses the desert where silence becomes vast and elemental, and arrives at the sea, where an abandoned vessel rests at the tide’s edge.

Each place allows silence to take on a different form, tender, heavy, and expansive, marking phases of loss and transformation.

And through it all, it asks: what endures when everything else begins to fade?

Grandma - Where Memories still hold on

Light touches empty rooms that once were filled with laughter and joy. Time doesn’t heal but lingers in every corner, brushing against memories, leaving scars and pain that wrap around the soul and refuse to let go.

I know she will always come back, though as both a loud pain and silent grief, filling the space while leaving traces of what remains. Even in absence, something endures, quietly holding the room together, a reminder of love and the essence that once lived here.

In the words of John Koenig, “You can’t mourn something you’ve lost without celebrating the rarity of its presence in your life.”

Buried Village - The remains of a place people once called home

Outside, the village drifts slowly from home into landscape. The photographs observe how time reclaims what was once human, tracing the outlines of walls still visible beneath the sand.

Shapes of rooms, corners, and structures retain the faintest impressions of memory, even as the desert settles deeper into them. These moments lived become fragments, faded by the years, left as quiet reminders of what stood here. Bit by bit, the familiar gives way to earth, and the place that was once a home becomes part of the landscape again.

Silence - Nothing but Sand, Sky, and Stillness

This is a place where traces of people fade. The land stretches wide and empty, lifeless but not silent. Stillness asks you to pause, to listen. Shapes once familiar thin and vanish, distances grow, and the eye catches what would be missed elsewhere.

Silence belongs not to a home or a person, but to the land itself. Light moves slowly across dunes, rising and falling without notice. The desert keeps its own pace, unhurried, indifferent. Here, the world feels boundless, bare, and endlessly still, a moment simply to be.

Ghost Ship - The Life After Movement

A vessel rests on the shore, carried only by time. After movement and after life, it remains, neither wreckage nor monument, only quiet endurance. Metal softens under salt, its form fading into the horizon. The tide continues, simple and unhurried, without memory or witness.

The story is found in absence, in what endures when human traces vanish. The sea does not remember. It does not mourn. It only holds the vessel, showing how small and temporary all human presence is, while the landscape stretches on, vast, silent, and unchanging.