Fabric of Time / 2, in collaboration with DIFAF Gallery

Fabric of Time / 2
a collaboration between Difaf Gallery & no/mad utopia

Fabric of Time / 2 extends the reflection at the heart of the exhibition first presented at DIFAF Gallery in Cairo, examining time, memory, identity, and the ways in which the past persists, transforms, and resurfaces in the present within the practices of Lebanon-based artists.

At the threshold of the exhibition, Johanne Allard’s Nectar in a Sieve series speaks of time as a process of filtering, where loss, retention, and transformation leave their traces. The sieve separates the essential from the ephemeral, leaving behind fragments that allow the past to take new forms.

From these remnants, Yasmina Hilal, Ieva Saudargaitė Douaihi, and Fadi Al-Melhem enter into dialogue with the past, each approaching its lingering traces from a different point of departure.

Yasmina Hilal moves within the intimate sphere, where bodies, gestures, objects, images, and relationships carry memory. Between recollection and imagination, the personal and the collective, her work considers what is passed down—and what happens when we begin to rewrite it. Here, tenderness and loss become intertwined, extending the question of inheritance from family memory to the weight of collective grief.

Ieva Saudargaitė Douaihi gathers vintage photographs, everyday objects, and traces of lived experience into new constellations. The familiar meets the unknown; found images enter personal memory, becoming hybrid forms in which past and present, disappearance and persistence, overlap. Her works inhabit the space between what is found and what is created, revealing identity as porous, speculative, and continually reconstructed.

Starting with a family album found in southern Syria, Fadi Al-Melhem explores how photographs act as traces of lives and stories, and how a father-son relationship unfolds across generations. But this legacy extends beyond the image itself: habits, behaviours, beliefs, forms of authority, and social structures are reproduced over time. Through printing and repetition, his work opens a space to observe, question, and perhaps disrupt the patterns passed down to us.

In Fabric of Time / 2, the works of the three artists move between the intimate and the collective, the inherited and the imagined, the remembered and the unknown. They meet in a space where the past is never entirely behind us, and where photographs become fragments from which memories are reconstructed, identities reimagined, and histories carried forward.

Marie-Mathilde Jaber

Director & Founder of no/mad utopia