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 only 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 not as fixed forms but 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 drawing, painting, ceramics, textiles, and installation, they turn to automatism as a shared method of transcendence; of accessing unconscious and symbolic worlds. Through rhythmic repetition, these artists summon a sense of trance, 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. Through these varied approaches, the artists here reveal a spectrum of forms that meditate on life’s enduring sources: earth, water, ritual, culture, and myth.