Aisha Alabbar Gallery is pleased to present What We Carry Becomes the Terrain, a solo exhibition by Bénédicte Gimonnet. The exhibition brings together paintings, screen prints, drawings, and textile works that reflect on the unstable terrain of belonging, cultural inheritance, and the ways a sense of self is shaped across places and time. Together, they treat landscape as something carried
as much as inhabited.
The exhibition follows a pivotal journey back to Peru, marking a renewed engagement with the places and historical roots that have long informed her practice. Rather than depicting the rainforest as a geographical reality, Gimonnet transforms it into a site of reckoning, where recollection, imagination, and lived experience converge. Dense vegetation, vibrant colour, and shifting perspectives create psychological landscapes that are at once intimate and expansive.
For more than a decade, Gimonnet has developed immersive painted environments that blur the boundaries between place and interiority. In this exhibition, that visual language deepens through recurring architectural motifs. Windows, façades, and thresholds emerge within lush vegetation, creating a dialogue between built structures and organic growth. These forms evoke the human impulse to define, contain, and order, while everything around them continually resists fixed boundaries, holding in tension ideas of origin, transformation, and multiplicity.
Textile forms a central thread throughout the exhibition. Fabrics sourced from Peru, France, and the UAE are interwoven with Talli, the metallic thread embroidery traditional to the Emirates, bringing together materials that carry distinct histories and traditions of making. Gimonnet’s work Grand Echo Rouge, 2026, brings forth this technique of the seam becoming both scar and bridge, expressing connection while preserving difference. Through these works, Gimonnet positions making as a way of assembling a culture, with the material itself holding the record of movement, encounter and exchange.
The exhibition also introduces the Gran Eco series, meaning Grand Echo in Spanish. An echo implies distance, delay, memory and transformation: the emotional resonance of a transient place, returning altered. The works are tall vertical drawings and canvases in which Gimonnet isolates personal iconic sites, architecture intertwined with vegetation, from those same countries and from the United Kingdom, the places where she has lived longest. They are not documentary records but reverberations.
Accompanying these are ink drawings that do the same work at close range, meditative chronicles of something still forming. Their ultra-fine line work, surrounded by graphite annotations marking time and duration, makes process itself the subject: identity unfolding through repetition and persistence. Rather than presenting belonging as something fixed or recovered, Gimonnet proposes it as something continually assembled through memory, material and lived experience, inviting viewers to reflect on the fragments of place that shape our understanding of home.
