Currently on view at NIKA Project Space, Rooted Echoes presents new works by Ahed Al Kathiri, Yasmine Al Awa, and Zahra Jewanjee, created during the gallery’s Summer Open Studio Residency. The exhibition reflects on memory, identity, and belonging, tracing how personal histories and cultural inheritances are carried, transformed, and reimagined through contemporary artistic practice. Curated by Nadine Khoury, the show will be open to the public until 1 November 2025.
Dubai-based artist Ahed Al Kathiri, of Yemeni origin, works across textiles, sound, writing, and performance to examine displacement and the layered meanings of home. Drawing on oral memory and familial narratives, her practice often translates intimate experiences into collective encounters. The exhibition features her multi-channel sound installation I Learned the Longing in Jada’s Throat (2025), which combines fabrics from Yemen with recordings of her grandmother singing traditional hymns. In this work, Al Kathiri evokes a sensory landscape of memory and transforms her grandmother’s voice into a shared space of remembrance and tenderness.
Yasmine Al Awa, a Syrian artist raised in the UAE, turns her gaze toward the domestic sphere as a repository of memory. Her hyperrealistic paintings depict familiar corners of her grandparents’ home, where furniture and textiles act as vessels for identity and nostalgia. By focusing on these quiet interiors, Al Awa meditates on how material surroundings bear the emotional weight of absence and inheritance: how the inanimate preserves traces of what has been lived, lost, and remembered.
Multidisciplinary Pakistani artist and educator Zahra Jewanjee draws from nature, mythology, science, and philosophy to explore structures of agency, ecology, and belonging. In one strand of her practice, she has invented Zuban-e-Kursi, a fictional language built around the anatomy of chairs, which she uses to question systems of order and the dynamics between individuality and collectivity. In Rooted Echoes, Jewanjee presents mixed-media works and paintings that centre on the Ghaf tree, a resilient emblem of endurance in the UAE’s landscape. Through this recurring motif, she reflects on adaptation, displacement, and the interconnectedness of living systems.
To get more information about Rooted Echoes, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you may be interested in viewing The Gulf Through Time: Dariush Zandi’s Photographic Journey and General Behaviour by Farah Al Qasimi, one of the online exhibitions at the Cultural Foundation.
