Green Art Gallery presents When the Window Refused to Fly, and the Arch Decided to Hold the Sky, a solo exhibition by Emirati artist Asma Belhamar, which offers a poetic reconsideration of architecture, memory, and imagination. It features a collection of diverse artworks that rethink the built environment as a repository of personal histories and collective futures. Curated by Duygu Demir, the show will be open to the public until 18 March 2026.
Ranging from drawings to 3D-printed stoneware clay, wood, and ceramic tiles, Belhamar’s work in this exhibition explores how elements such as windows, walls, staircases, and arches carry layered meanings: as physical structures, as vessels of memory, and as sites of imaginative play. Her art pieces merge fragments of familiar ornamentation with modular urban and domestic forms, inviting visitors to navigate them as though moving through a transformed courtyard.
This idea of the courtyard, drawn from a childhood memory of an unfinished family space where Belhamar and other children turned discarded building materials into a playground, becomes a metaphor for being between past and present, reality, and reverie. The viewers are encouraged to walk and imagine: to become participants in a space that oscillates between playful nostalgia and critical reflection on how environments shape us.
Belhamar’s drawings further amplify this exploration. With a visual language that conjures the psychogeography of a city seen from motion (fleeting corners, stretched shadows, and layered grids), these artworks register the force of urban acceleration and the residue of memory.
About the artist
Asma Belhamar (b. 1988, Dubai) holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University (Dubai, 2012), where she serves as an Assistant Professor, and an MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, USA, 2017). Belhamar is also a graduate of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design (Abu Dhabi, 2014).
Belhamar’s practice bridges installation, print, video, and 3D modelling to investigate how built environments shape perception and recollection. Her work considers the UAE’s rapidly evolving urban landscape as a site of topographical memory, cultural synthesis, and hybrid form-making, developing a visual language that moves between the organic and the constructed, the remembered and the imagined.
Belhamar’s work has been presented in different exhibitions, including Siraj, Islamic Arts Festival (Sharjah, 2025); Maknana: An Archaeology of New Media Art in the Arab World (Diriyah Art Futures, Riyadh, KSA, 2025); Guest Relations (Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, 2023); and Emerge III: Converging Lines (Sestiere Dorsoduro 47, Venice, Italy, 2019), to name a few.
She has also realised several public art commissions, such as Thresholds of Perception: Redefining Balcony Spaces (Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai, 2024) and Union of Artists, produced in collaboration with four other artists (Dubai, 2024), among others. In 2011, Belhamar received the Sheikha Manal Young Artist Award in the Fine Arts category.
For more information about When the Window Refused to Fly, and the Arch Decided to Hold the Sky, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in attending In the Space of Becoming by Alia Hussain Lootah.
