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 habitat and self. Across various mediums, 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.
As the exhibition travels from the gallery to Abu Dhabi Art, its centre of gravity shifts. What was once rooted in the soil now ascends into air. The works begin to hover between worlds. Here, the exhibition moves toward a state of suspension - where emotion, thought, and spirit intermingle in spaces between presence and dream. Gestures flow out like ritual, repetition is invocation, and the material world grows porous, open to transformation. The artists here move through emotional and spiritual frequencies, tracing invisible structures of feeling and belief. What once pulsed beneath the surface now floats, weightless and meditative - a reminder that what begins in the earth may always find a way to rise.
Featuring
Almaha Jaralla, Chafa Ghaddar, Hashel Al Lamki, Lulwah Al Homoud, Nasser Almulhim, Saj Issa