About the booth
Ayyam Gallery returns to Art Dubai for their most recent edition, presenting a booth featuring works by Faisal Samra, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Thaier Helal, Abdalla Al Omari, Tammam Azzam, and Hisham Sharif. This multimedia presentation explores the concept of “a moment in time” through personal, political, and emotional perspectives.
Known for challenging traditional modes of representation, Faisal Samra views art as a space for experimentation and exploration, guided by spontaneity, dynamism, and a sense of secrecy. In the Immortal Moment series, spontaneous gestures in ink, charcoal, and paint capture the fleeting instant that becomes eternal through the act of mark-making. These works show Samra’s ongoing rebellion against fixed artistic boundaries, turning temporary experiences into something timeless—where every intentional moment has the potential to be immortalized.
Sadik Kwaish Alfraji presents a series of vignettes, each capturing a singular moment to form a cohesive visual narrative. Rendered in his signature monochromatic palette, these works depict scenes drawn from a personal archive shaped by collective displacement. Though grounded in individual experience, each image evokes a universal sense of longing, suggesting that memory itself is a suspended form of time. Through a multimedia practice, Alfraji has long examined the relationship between the self and the world, tracing the fragility of human existence through themes of loss, exile, fragmentation, and displacement.
Thaier Helal and Abdalla Al Omari mark a shift in their practices toward more gestural, emotionally driven approaches. Helal’s layered abstractions reflect natural cycles and existential themes, while Omari distills figuration into blurred, emotive fragments that privilege feeling over form. Helal’s practice centers on texture and his extensive experimental history with medium. Yet this time, texture comes into play through the rather traditional medium of paint, further allowing the application and brushstrokes to be imbued with emotion and intention, dynamism, and drive.
Al Omari’s works, although figurative, hold a great deal of mystery. Exploring the overcharged environment that surrounds him, Abdalla Al Omari has moved from speaking of forced exile to adapting to a new home, one in which he questions his identity and slowly acclimates to a new sense of self, while also questioning his belonging in a society he has just come to know. His newer works confront the personal alongside the political by depicting imagery of political figures and their mothers, set against scenes of everyday life, creating a subtle yet striking contrast that suggests even the most constructed public identities may ultimately stem from love. Through fragmentation, Al Omari draws these elements together, weaving them into a cohesive image that unites the personal and the political into a single, resonant whole.
Tammam Azzam revisits imagery of urban landscapes through the delicate medium of watercolor, using it to suspend architectural structures in time. Alongside his watercolor practice, Azzam has long developed collage works that blend landscapes from Syria and Berlin, merging memory and reconstruction through layered imagery and material tension. His fascination with urban environments is evident in his continual construction and deconstruction of their forms, explored through diverse textural approaches. In Azzam’s work, medium and composition are inseparable. His renderings create a striking sense of depth through shifting vantage points, horizon lines, and perspectives. The ever-changing environmental, natural, and sociopolitical conditions that surround us play a central role in his compositions, in which the medium itself is subjected to a dynamic interplay of tension and form.
Hisham Sharif’s abstract impressionist practice explores the intersection of memory, observation, and emotion, constructing moments that seem suspended in time. Scenes of daily life unfold through gestural brushwork, where spontaneity coexists with stillness and the canvas becomes a space where lived experience and recollection converge. Sharif moves between observed reality and pictorial memory, layering visual impressions that collapse past and present into a single image. Through the interplay of color, light, and acrylic technique, his paintings evoke mood while building a complex accumulation of evolving imagery that reflects both the immediacy of everyday life and the persistence of memory.
Together, these artists offer a poignant meditation on how singular moments can hold expansive meaning, emotionally, historically, and visually.
About the artists
Thaier Helal
Texture is central to Thaier Helal’s practice, it has allowed him to craft a unique visual language that captures and reconstructs the physical and sensory dimensions of the world around him. Incorporating a variety of artistic approaches, including unconventional media, such as paint, sand, glue, coal, found objects, and more, Helal has consistently demonstrated a profound fascination with the three-dimensional qualities of his work, aiming to establish an immediate, tactile connection with his audience. Abstraction has been a defining element throughout his career, although it occasionally allows for figuration to emerge. Figurative elements have appeared in Helal’s earlier work, especially in response to the war in his native Syria.
Tammam Azzam
Tammam Azzam is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is based on building and deconstructing composition. What began as an exploration of texture through the layering of diverse media has evolved into a close examination of demolished landscapes—symbolic of his homeland’s war-ravaged environment. Azzam’s artistic practice continuously adapts to his perception of the urban surroundings, which are in constant flux due to shifting natural, environmental, and geopolitical conditions. This transformation in the visual identity of the landscape drives his work and has led him to experiment with the tension and interplay created by his chosen media.
Faisal Samra
Long considered one of the Arab Gulf’s foremost artists and a pioneer of conceptual art in the Middle East, Bahraini-born, Saudi national Faisal Samra incorporates digital photography, painting, sculpture, video, and performance in a creative repertoire that explores existentialist themes with the figure at its center. Since the mid-1970s, Samra has tested the conventional functions of media through meticulously structured works with experimentation and research as the guiding principles of his artistic practice. As his oeuvre has progressed and defied traditional modes of representation, he has rebelled against his own understanding of art, transitioning into new works that maintain three essential concepts: spontaneity, dynamism, and secrecy.
Sadik Kwaish Alfraji
Sadik Kwaish Alfraji explores what he describes as ‘the problem of existence’ through drawings, paintings, video animations, art books, graphic art, and installations. Alfraji’s distinct visual language addresses the vulnerability of human existence and speaks of loss, exile, fragmentation and displacement. The shadowy protagonist who often appears in Alfraji’s multimedia works represents a black void, a filter that allows him to explore the intricacies of life. By rendering his solitary character as a charcoal-coloured silhouette and minimising the formal properties of his compositions, Alfraji captures the expressed movements and subtle inflections of the body in psychologically laden environments.
Abdallah Al Omari
Abdalla Al Omari is a Syrian multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of displacement, conflict, the human condition, and, more recently, takes on more sensitive topics around identity. Born in Damascus and currently based in Belgium, Omari uses painting as a powerful medium to express his enduring ties to Syria and his evolving persona in a new environment shaped by exile’s realities. His intricately figurative and detailed works, which recently blur into composition studies, are marked by deep emotional resonance and capture life’s complexities through the expressive use of vibrant colour.
Hisham Sharif
Guided by both emotion and technique, Hisham Sharif’s paintings serve as emotional landscapes: dense, intuitive, and haunted by fragments of personal and collective history. Initially trained in finance, Sharif applies a structural clarity to the chaotic, exploring dislocation and inherited memory for their formal and psychological significance. His canvases rarely reveal a clear subject, yet they pulse with presence—evoking seascapes, architectural ruins, or intimate scenes.