On display at Green Art Gallery until 31 July 2026, All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset brings together works by Alla Abdunabi, Fatma Al Ali, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, and Michael Rakowitz in an exhibition that examines the enduring legacies of empire, colonialism, and cultural domination. The show takes its title from a phrase attributed to the ancient Mesopotamian ruler Sargon of Akkad and explores how imperial ambitions continue to shape contemporary political, cultural, and social realities. Through painting, sculpture, installation, archival intervention, and conceptual practices, the participating artists investigate how power is constructed, represented, and remembered across centuries.
Rather than presenting empire as a historical phenomenon confined to the distant past, the exhibition argues for its continued relevance in the present. The artists reveal how imperial structures survive through language, geography, economic systems, cultural narratives, and visual symbols. Across the exhibition, acts of naming, erasure, reconstruction, and reinterpretation emerge as recurring strategies. Historical events and artefacts are revisited to expose the distortions, omissions, and contradictions that accompany official histories.
A central contribution to the show comes from Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, whose series All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset (2018) lends the exhibition its title. Balteo-Yazbeck’s multidisciplinary practice often examines the intersections of politics, economics, and historical memory. His artworks on view combine fragments of commercial typography with digitally sourced imagery, creating visually striking collages that echo the language of advertising, social media, and global communication networks. At the same time, they evoke ancient imperial declarations and modern geopolitical ambitions.
Balteo-Yazbeck’s altered maps and cartographic interventions further investigate contested territories and shifting political narratives. They demonstrate how geography itself can become a tool of power and ideological projection. Through subtle gestures of removal and concealment, the artist reveals the fragility of seemingly fixed political realities.
Emirati artist Fatma Al Ali, whose practice frequently engages with overlooked histories and archival materials, presents her project Once Upon a Pirate Coast. It revisits the British military campaign against the Qawasim fleet in 1809, a pivotal event in the colonial history of the Gulf region. In Of Ships, Sails, and Misguided Labels (2024), Al Ali overlays historical prints with typewritten texts that shift the perspective away from colonial narrators and toward the land itself. This imaginative repositioning challenges the authority of imperial documentation and opens space for alternative interpretations of the past.
Al Ali’s accompanying installation and audio work, I Picked Up a Coin and Heard a Whisper (2024), focuses on the disappearance of local monetary systems under colonial influence. Through replicated coins, archival references, and spoken narratives, the artist traces the circulation of power through trade, currency, and storytelling, highlighting how economic systems often serve as instruments of political control.
Another key participant is Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, internationally recognised for projects that address cultural displacement, loss, and the consequences of war. His long-running series “The invisible enemy should not exist” reconstructs artefacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Using materials such as Middle Eastern food packaging and Arabic-language newspapers, Rakowitz painstakingly recreates objects from the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud and other archaeological sites.
These reconstructions function simultaneously as memorials and critiques. They draw attention to the destruction and displacement of cultural heritage while exposing the ways empires, both ancient and modern, have used art and artefacts to assert authority. By transforming everyday materials into surrogates for lost treasures, Rakowitz underscores the complex relationship between memory, absence, and cultural survival.
Libyan artist Alla Abdunabi explores the symbolic afterlives of empire through representations of the Barbary lion, a species driven to extinction through colonial-era hunting yet preserved as an enduring emblem of authority and conquest. In Foreign Bodies I (2024), Abdunabi reinterprets historical depictions of lions by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, examining how animals become entangled in narratives of exoticism, domination, and cultural imagination.
Her large-scale relief sculptures, taste sweet, taste bitter (2024), reference the instrumental use of Roman ruins during Italian colonial rule in Libya, when archaeological restoration was employed as a form of political propaganda. By exposing the labour and construction behind these sculptural surfaces, Abdunabi challenges notions of permanence and questions the historical narratives embedded within monumental forms.
The artworks in All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset create a complex dialogue between antiquity and the present day. Ancient empires, colonial enterprises, and contemporary geopolitical systems appear not as separate historical episodes but as interconnected structures that continue to shape cultural memory and global power relations. Humour, material transformation, archival intervention, and acts of reconstruction become tools through which the artists confront inherited narratives and expose their underlying mechanisms.
To get more information about All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in visiting Time the Destroyer Is Time the Preserver by Jorge Tacla.
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