Across a Velvet Horizon, is a collaborative presentation of Egyptian artists Nada Baraka and Esraa Elfeky. The exhibition orbits a sense of incompleteness, an expanse of the unknown that speaks to the human impulse to make sense of the past - to impose coherence on chaos, and create stories that mend the gaps in what we know. Here, history is unfixed and left open to question. Viewers are invited to sit with uncertainty, to embrace the search even when the full picture remains tantalisingly out of reach.
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Baraka’s paintings act as portals into fractured, surreal landscapes. Inspired by her late grandfather Ahmed Ali Kamal’s archive, her acrylic and oil canvases incorporate elements like postcards heavy with hidden emotions, their texts faintly discernible beneath vivid layers of paint. Works such as The Edge of Saudade and The Colour of Why exude an aching sense of longing, as though the past is slipping through one’s fingers. Baraka describes her process as engaging with the ‘antilogic’ of dreams, where memories are reimagined into surreal narratives. A wooden structure within the gallery serves as both sculpture and metaphor - a map inviting viewers to navigate these fragmented stories and construct connections of their own.
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Elfeky’s sculptures, in dialogue, evoke artefacts from a lost world. Inspired by a desert plot in Cairo that was once submerged beneath the sea, her soft, fabric-covered forms resemble fossils or the remnants of ancient organisms. Her largest work, The Blue Wadi Resurrection, sprawls across the gallery floor like a relic unearthed from deep time, in contrast with works in smaller scale. Threads, leather, and fabric intertwine to create forms poised between decay and renewal, extinction and adaptation. Suspended sculptures hover in liminal spaces, as though caught between worlds, waiting to be deciphered.
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Across a Velvet Horizon resists offering answers, instead provoking questions and inviting the audience to engage with uncertainty. How do we reconstruct history from fragments? What stories are hidden in the traces left behind? And how do we come to terms with what is missing?
