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. Surrealism, too, was a fertile rupture, born of a desire to displace logic and give form to the subconscious. The artists in Fertile Dreams inherit this generative impulse. Their work draws from the language of automatism as instinct: a mode of forging new cosmologies through mark-making, gesture, and rhythm. They imagine otherwise in times of flux, where the symbolic and the sensual collide.
Fertile Dreams brings together artists from the MENA region and its diaspora whose practices engage fertility as a generative force connected to questions of origin, transformation, and the cycles that govern land and self. Working across drawing, painting, ceramics, textiles, and installation, our selected artists reveal a spectrum of forms to meditate on life’s enduring sources: earth, water, culture, ritual, and mythologies.