Talal Al Najjar’s Mesh & Mayhem, curated by Salem AlSuwaidi, unravels a terrain where digital architectures and localized memory entwine, forming a fabric stretched thin across speculative futures and fractured realities. The exhibition confronts the way simulation infiltrates geography and biology—where the mesh becomes both structure and rupture, at once a connective tissue and a site of collapse.
Repetition is never mere duplication but a force of excess; here it manifests in the recursive circulation of meshes, video fragments, and 3D surfaces that endlessly reproduce without resolution. In AlNajjar’s hands, repetition builds toward abundance, toward mayhem, toward a psychic overload that mirrors the saturated image-economy of 2025.
Video game engines, with their banalized depictions of violence and their indifference to cultural specificity, loom large as a visual and conceptual language. Al Najjar offers blueprints of cities and avatars of people reduced to playfields, where geopolitical scars are fictionalized into battle maps and rendered as scenery.
Within this frame, Gulf history becomes a mesh of contradictory desires: the drive to codify heritage into monumental form colliding with the unruly excess of digital invention. What emerges is an imagined archive of futures—some absurd, some unsettling—where memory, fantasy, and spectacle converge.
Al Najjar stages this as a psychoscape of abundance: 3D-printed bioplastics glitched with industrial handwork, sculptural forms echoing rust-maps and distorted terrains, video loops replaying like malfunctioning cameos. These works refuse stable meaning. They oscillate between virtual precision and physical disarray, reminding us that every virtual object is a mesh, every repetition an opening onto another fiction.
The exhibition seeks only fracture—where the mesh stretches to its limit, and mayhem becomes the only honest form of truthfulness.
—Curator, Salem AlSuwaidi
