Until 15 February 2026, Artbooth Gallery is hosting Encoded in Petals, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Soraya Abu Naba’a that unfolds as an immersive encounter with memory, nature, and cultural continuity. Featuring paintings, textile art pieces, drawings, sculptures, and spatial interventions, the show is the culmination of several years of research and artistic exploration.
Drawing on her lived experience across the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe, and the USA, Abu Naba’a approaches identity as shaped by movement, material memory, and sensory experience. Her visual language bridges abstraction, traditional craft, digital aesthetics, and ecological awareness. Colour, texture, and form function as systems of communication.
In the exhibited works, botanical imagery, especially floral forms, serves both as motif and conceptual framework. Inspired by floriography, the historical “language of flowers,” the art pieces engage botanical forms as carriers of emotion, ancestral narratives, and ecological consciousness. Abu Naba’a’s layered compositions often evoke rivers, topographies, and systems of exchange, suggesting a deep interdependence between landscape, memory, and human experience.
Rooted in a practice that blurs the boundaries between nature and self, culture, and craft, Soraya Abu Naba’a’s work invites viewers into contemplative spaces where memory blooms into form and stories unfold like petals, revealing the layered intersections of identity, ecology, and human experience.
About the artist
Soraya Abu Naba’a (b. 1985, Melbourne, Florida, USA) studied at La Sorbonne in Paris (France), completed a BFA at Paris American University, pursued sculpture in Florence (Italy), and studied painting at Columbia University in New York (USA). She also earned a Master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in London (UK).
Abu Naba’a was born into a richly layered cultural heritage: her father was Palestinian and her mother Lebanese, though born in the Dominican Republic. This diverse lineage and her early years in the vibrant tropical environment of Santo Domingo influenced her aesthetic sensibility and thematic interests.
Abu Naba’a has participated in dozens of group exhibitions, biennials, and solo shows internationally, such as From the Flora series (Gary Nader Art Centre, Miami, USA, 2023); Vertical encounters, Personal Structures – Identities (Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy, 2019); ArtRio (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2016); and the 27th Visual Arts Biennale (Modern Art Museum, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 2013) (catalogue), among many others. Her work is part of esteemed private and public collections in several countries, including the USA, the Dominican Republic, Turkey, and Switzerland.
To get more information about Encoded in Petals, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in visiting the Hybrid Vistas collective exhibition and Remnants by Kais Salman.
