No night is long enough for us to dream twice (a title drawn from a line by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish) brings together contemporary photography and video by nine artists – Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mohamad Abdouni, Hicham Benohoud, Myriam Boulos, Mohamed Bourouissa, Sabiha Çimen, Hannah Darabi and Abdulhamid Kircher – from South West Asia, North Africa and their diasporas.
What connects these artists is not geography alone but a shared engagement with conditions of pressure, rupture and transformation. Their works emerge from sites where social, political and emotional forces accumulate, break apart and reform. In doing so, they mirror the contemporary condition of photography itself: a medium operating at the limits of representation and reality.
Rather than simply documenting what has been, these images push against the boundaries of the world they depict. Through aesthetic strategies of intensification, the artists create images that are hypervisceral, hypersaturated and affectively overwhelming. Photography becomes less a record than a force, capable of unsettling perception and opening new ways of seeing.
The show reflects on the unstable relationship between images and reality in the present moment. If dreaming is understood as a collective and political act of imagining otherwise, the title suggests that the work of the image in shaping reality remains unfinished.
Image credits – Abdulhamid Kircher Untitled 2022. Silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Madrid. © Abdulhamid Kircher.
Sabiha Çimen A plane flies low over students at an amusement park. Istanbul, 2018 from the series ‘Hafiz’ 2021. Archival pigment print, 80 x 80 cm. Courtesy LOOCK, Berlin. © Sabiha Çimen / Magnum Photos.
Basel Abbas, Ruanne Abou-Rahme Collapse 2009 (still). Single channel video and sound (black and white), 8 min 20 sec. Courtesy of the artists. © Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
Hannah Darabi Untitled from the series ‘Mahvash’s Book of Pleasure, Why Don’t You Dance?’ 2026. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the Artist and Photo Elysée, Lausanne. © Hannah Darabi.
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