What Remains to Be Seen is a solo exhibition by Palestinian artist Aissa Deebi, on view at Fire Station. The show, running through 13 December 2025, features new paintings Deebi created during his Ruwad in Residence programme. It reflects his inquiry into the politics of vision: how seeing can become a site of power, surveillance, erasure, and also resistance. Rather than depicting destruction in a literal or documentary way, the artworks reclaim visual space from mechanisms that flatten history and human experience.
Deebi’s canvases unfold as stark, atmospheric landscapes. Muted horizons and vacant urban silhouettes evoke places marked by impact, loss, and memory. Birds appear throughout these compositions as messengers or witnesses, figures that oscillate between fragility and persistence. Through the material slowness of paint, the works counter the acceleration of modern image culture, where a catastrophe is consumed rapidly and forgotten just as quickly.
In the exhibition, to see is not passive. It becomes a moral act, one that asks viewers to slow down, to look with care, and to acknowledge what remains even when so much is gone. The title itself poses an open question: after violence, rupture, and attempted erasure, what remains to be seen, and who has the right or the responsibility to see it?
About the artist
Dr Aissa Deebi (b. 1969, Haifa) is an artist, curator, and writer who divides his time between Switzerland and Qatar. He has held several notable academic and leadership roles, which include serving as Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University (the USA), as well as being a Visiting Reader in Contemporary Art Middle East at Birmingham City University (the UK) and a Visiting International Faculty member at CEDIM (Mexico). Deebi was also the Founder and Director of the Visual Cultures Program at the American University in Cairo. Currently, he is Director of the Painting + Printmaking Department and Associate Professor of Art at VCUarts Qatar.
In his practice, Deebi delves into the intersections of art and politics, with a particular focus on cultural migration, diaspora, exile, postcolonial discourse, and history. His early projects explored the complexities of daily life in post-1948 Palestine, later expanding toward themes of immigration and alienation. This research culminated in his PhD, which analysed the diaspora as a generative and creative space. Deebi has also created a substantial artistic oeuvre that explores the lived realities of cultural displacement, especially through the lens of a Palestinian immigrant navigating the post-September 11 American context.
His work has been presented widely in exhibitions and major international art platforms, such as Art Dubai; the 55th Venice Biennale (Italy); Çanakkale Biennale (Turkey); Beirut Art Fair (Lebanon); and the Asia-Pacific Triennial (Taipei, Taiwan), among others.
To get more information about What Remains to Be Seen, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in attending Prix Pictet: Storm and Restless Circle by Afra Al Dhaheri.
