Land doesn’t simply support life, it becomes its own dreaming body.
Fertile Dreams exists in the slippages between soil and psyche, where earthly terrain fuels the landscape of the unconscious. Fertility is not just a question of biology, but of sustenance, origin, and return - a force that feeds, replenishes, and reawakens. It speaks to cycles of growth and erosion, presence and absence, fuel and flame.
In this dream-like terrain, bodies surface as shifting topographies. A line might be a riverbed, a curve evocative of a womb, a gesture summons ritual. Some works strip away distraction to arrive at the essential; others conjure ancient energies, drawing inspiration from the raw materials of land, myth, and spiritual practice. Fertility flows here as a life source - intuitive, vital, and uncontained. Dreams, in this setting are fields of possibility - irrational, charged, symbolic. The boundary between matter and metaphor dissolves; what begins in the earth stirs in the imagination, and what pulses beneath the surface takes shape in form, pigment, texture, sound.
Fertile Dreams brings together artists from the MENA region and its diaspora whose practices engage fertility as a generative force tied to questions of origin, transformation, and the cycles that govern land and self. Across various mediums, they turn to automatism as a shared method of transcendence, of accessing unconscious and symbolic worlds. Through rhythmic repetition, they summon a sense of invocation and imaginative flight, ritual unfolding through mark and motion. Rooted in Surrealist philosophy yet resonant with the mystic patterns of Middle Eastern spiritual traditions, their works open passages between body and land, spirit and matter, dream and physicality.
The exhibition space is an evolving terrain, expanding over time, through new iterations and responses to site. The artists are anchored in the element of earth - primal, tactile, and materially expressive. Charcoal bears the trace of the body, its movement registering across the surface as evidence of touch and duration. Fresco, carrying layered histories, has been produced in direct response to the site, its surface absorbing the passage of time and labour. Natural pigments, absorbed from soil and stone, retain the imprint of place, evoking the textures of local life. Motifs of fruit, roots, and harvest reflect cycles of sustenance and return, while organic forms allude to processes of growth, decay, and regeneration. Through these material investigations, the artists trace connections between self and dream, ancestral lineage and imagination, grounding their contemporary expression in an enduring dialogue between body, land, and time.
Featuring
Almaha Jaralla
Alymamah Rashed
Chafa Ghaddar
Maitha Abdalla
Nada Baraka
Pippa El-Kadhi Brown
Rema Ghuloum
Randa Maddah
Saj Issa
