About the booth
For the inaugural edition of Frieze Abu Dhabi, Ayyam Gallery is pleased to present a multidisciplinary three-artist booth featuring Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Rula Halawani, and Abu Dhabi-based sculptor Athar Jaber. The presentation brings together distinct yet interconnected approaches to memory, narrative, and materiality across animation, photography, drawing, and sculpture.
We will present, for the first time in a commercial context, Sadik’s A Thread of Light Between My Mother’s Fingers and Heaven, originally commissioned by LACMA and exhibited internationally. Shown alongside a series of drawings, the work revisits childhood memories, family meals and the tenderness of his mother’s hands, forming a poetic homage to maternal care.
In parallel, we debut Rula Halawani’s The Last Chapter, concluding a series begun in 2014. Turning inward, she revisits her archives, transforming images through experimental techniques into textured compositions that challenge perceptions of time and space.
Athar Jaber’s sculptures explore fractured surfaces and emotional intensity, depicting a woman’s face suspended between softness and strain. Together, the works foreground feminine presence and the enduring figure of the mother.
About the artists
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.
Rula Halawani
As a native of occupied East Jerusalem, Rula Halawani began her artistic career by registering the difficulties of living under a protracted political conflict. Halawani’s early works capture the many aspects of this reality, from the tedious moments of attempting to perform daily tasks under the restrictions of military occupation to the cyclical onset of violent siege that transforms Palestinian neighbourhoods, towns, and cities into overnight war zones.
Athar Jaber
Building on the classical notion of the mind trapped within the body, as put forward by Michelangelo in his series of Slaves or Prisoners, Athar expands this concept, using the body as a metaphor for socio-political dynamics that entrap both individuals and entire societies. The body becomes a means to address power dynamics, social structures, and the human condition.