For her first solo exhibition in the UAE, In Circulation, Samar Hejazi presents a body of work that unfolds through an ongoing tension between structure and dissolution, stability and flux. Working across textile, printmaking, and spatial intervention, Hejazi approaches form not as a fixed entity, but as something contingent—held together through repetition and fragility. The exhibition avoids a singular framework or definitive resolution, instead unfolding through a series of guiding questions: What prevails when support is destabilized? How is meaning reconfigured as foundational systems shift? In what ways do structures—material or internal—operate not through permanence, but through sustained resilience over time? Rather than offering answers, In Circulation holds these questions in suspension, allowing meaning to emerge through material as a system of knowledge, not as medium. Hejazi’s practice engages processes of layering, erasure, and reconstruction.
Materials are stitched, suspended, or fragmented, resisting closure while retaining traces of what came before —where memory, labor, and repetition become embedded within the work, and making becomes inseparable from thinking. Framing the Imaginary introduces one of the exhibition’s central gestures: the frame. It is left intentionally empty, while loose threads extend beyond its edges, softening its boundary and inviting the viewer to imagine what might exist within it. Subtle shifts between black and white and saturated hues of green and blue evoke fragmented landscapes suggesting land and sea — oscillating between presence and absence. When responding to her question of how structures endure over time, Samar Hejazi turned to the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, selecting documented house deeds and architectural floor plans.
Presented as part of the Internal Archives series, these works are reworked through her process into layered compositions, where structures remain in flux, resisting a singular reading while positioning home as something constructed and reimagined through time. In Mawtini, Hejazi turns to a familiar national symbol, reworking it through her material language into a spatial intervention. The work does not present the anthem as fixed or complete, but allows it to unravel—fragmented, layered, and partially obscured—creating a quiet tension between recognition and distance. In Circulation looks beyond the constructs of ideals, resisting fixed conclusions and proposing meaning as something continuously formed and reformed through material and time.
Curated by Nadine Khoury
