Lawrie Shabibi opens 2026 with Invisible Fish, a poetic and timely exhibition by Libyan–Yurok artist Saif Azzuz, which marks his first solo presentation in the Middle East. Running through 3 April 2026, the show transforms the gallery into an immersive reflection on water, memory, and ecological change, bringing together paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and moving image.
Azzuz, who lives and works in San Francisco, approaches land and water not as passive elements but as living, relational systems. His practice draws attention to the fragile balance between people and the sea, revisiting the cultural and environmental histories of the region before the rise of its urban coastlines. Through his lens, water becomes a shared language of sustenance, migration, and connection across continents.
The exhibition’s title, Invisible Fish, draws inspiration from poet Joy Harjo, whose verses trace transformations through land, sea, and time. Her imagery of submerged life, human arrival, and industrial evolution resonates deeply with Azzuz’s own exploration of ecological shifts and ancestral memory. The poem becomes a conceptual current running through the exhibition, where environments, like histories, are layered, mutable, and alive.
Informed by his research into the UAE’s coastal heritage, Azzuz revisits a time when fishing villages and maritime labour defined everyday existence. He reflects on how those deep-rooted relationships to water persist amid the environmental transformations of modern development. In his vision, the sea is neither a distant backdrop nor a romantic metaphor; it is an active agent: adaptive, vulnerable, and constantly in dialogue with human life.
At the heart of the show is the series Algae Bloom, where paint flows, bleeds, and settles like tides on the canvas. Working wet-on-wet, Azzuz constructs aqueous compositions that hover between abstraction and experience, suggesting underwater growth, light, and organic motion. These are not underwater landscapes; they are rhythm, breath, and transformation made visible.
His Friend of Hamour, Hamour, Chinook, and Rainbow Trout paintings continue this dialogue, abstracting fish scales into textured, patterned surfaces that pulse with colour and repetition. They evoke the protective armour of marine life while recalling cellular or geological forms, positioning the sea within a broader ecosystem of natural patterning.
Azzuz’s sculptural installation, What’s a Pedagogy? I’m Trying to Eat, extends these connections to the UAE’s seafaring past. Made of traditional gargour fishing traps, it reimagines these utilitarian tools as both cultural markers and agents of environmental regeneration. Once submerged, such traps often become habitats for coral growth: a potent metaphor for adaptation and renewal.
The video installation In an Invented Summer the World Breaks Apart expands Azzuz’s conversation with water across geographies. Projected on three screens, it weaves together footage from San Francisco Bay, the Klamath River on Yurok land, and Dubai’s coastline. Aligned as a single horizon, these bodies of water merge into one fluid continuum, collapsing borders and histories through the artist’s personal connection to place.
Collectively, Invisible Fish speaks to the sea as a repository of memory, labour, and resilience. Through intuitive materials and research-based inquiry, Azzuz treats water not as a subject but as a shared condition, binding past and present, human and natural, across distances both real and imagined.
About the artist
Saif Azzuz (b. 1987) earned a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2013. He has exhibited widely across the USA, having displayed his works at venues such as CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco, CA), Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY), and Kadist (San Francisco, CA), among others. In 2022, Azzuz became a SFMOMA SECA Award finalist; he has also participated in the Clarion Alley Mural Project and the Facebook Artist in Residence programme.
To get more information about Invisible Fish, please go to the exhibition’s official web page.
In addition, you might be interested in viewing In the Space of Becoming by Alia Hussain Lootah and Remnants by Kais Salman.
