Aisha Alabbar Gallery is pleased to present Everybody Changes Underwater, the first solo exhibition by Emirati artist Faris Alshafar, on view from Monday 16 November 2026 to January 2027. The exhibition brings together new oil paintings that mark Alshafar's move from monochrome into colour. Drawing on music, video games and everyday moments in which people change how they act and look, the paintings unfold like episodes, each with its own logic.
The works explore how we alter our appearance and behaviour in response to desire and expectation, whether internally cultivated or externally imposed. Marking an expansion of Alshafar's chromatic vocabulary, palettes thaw from glacial to nautical to terrestrial before vaporising into placeless places. Forms hang like marionettes across load-bearing negative spaces, held or erased by forces unseen, while glyph-like gestures recalling shells, clock hands and candles recur from one painting to the next. Through dissolution, distortion and discontinuity, non-linear narratives of immersion and personal augmentation reveal themselves.
Interpersonal, corporate and military circumstances enter the paintings not as subject matter but as sources of form. Moving between asynchronous realities, Alshafar returns to music and video games as environments more reliably revisitable than physical surroundings prone to abrupt change. The exhibition moves between cosmetic and introspective modes of alteration, its forms shifting across landscape, object and being. In What It Feels Like for a Pearl, a large oceanic painting in pearlescent tones, transformation is assured and tender: a grain of sand actualising its coveted final form. In Void and Compensation, a self-contained system of melting ice and smoke echoes Simone Weil's line in Gravity and Grace: "May I never sully anything, even though I be utterly transformed into mud."
Weil's concept of decreation is reframed within the practice less as self-sacrifice than as a letting go of visual consequence. Passages are redacted, leaving islands and fragments of form, a quilting of first impressions akin to everyday perception and its physical and digital interruptions. The paintings hold sensory provisions for a future self, to be perceived, used, altered or left untouched by whoever that turns out to be.
