The easy answer is nothing. A collector pays, the work changes hands, and whatever happens next belongs to them privately, the same way anything else in a home does. Most people working in this field know collectors who clearly do not treat it that way, though, who behave as though buying a work opened a set of obligations rather than closing them off.

We interviewed Rémi Homs of the Barjeel Art Foundation for an earlier piece, and what struck me was how openly he spoke about the foundation’s holdings, and how much responsibility seemed to sit underneath that openness, as though the collection was being held on behalf of a wider public rather than kept for its own sake. Not many collectors could follow that model even if they wanted to, and it made the quieter, more common version of collecting look different by comparison, the version where a work simply enters a home and the trail more or less ends there.

It would be unreasonable to expect every collector to run a foundation, or publish a loans policy, or answer to scholars the way an institution does. Most people buy a painting because they love it, not because they are prepared to become its archivist. The responsibility does not need to scale that far to count for something, though: keeping a record of who sold a work and when, telling a gallery or an artist’s estate when a piece changes address, agreeing to a loan request without needing to be asked twice, letting a researcher photograph it once every few years. None of it requires a name on a building, only a willingness to stay reachable.

The Western canon has lived with a version of this same problem for decades, paintings vanishing into private hands after a war, a divorce, an estate sale, and over time it built infrastructure around that fact: catalogues raisonnés, restitution registries, provenance databases maintained by institutions with the funding and staff to keep them current. The modern Arab canon has had far less of that apparatus built around it, and far less time, given how much of its history was scattered by displacement before anyone had the chance to record it properly. For now, keeping track of a work’s whereabouts is work individual collectors end up doing themselves, since the apparatus most established canons take for granted has not yet caught up here.

I still think about my friend’s question. What, short of building a foundation, does an ordinary collector actually owe the work hanging on their wall?

Cover Image Courtesy of RAK Foundation

Words copyright of Naso Art Journal

Naso was passing through Rome this summer, briefly — a few days, the kind of trip that doesn’t leave time for the slow work of arriving somewhere and gradually finding the people who make it interesting. So we asked instead. One story, posted.

The replies arrived faster than we could read them. Studio shots, portfolio links, messages typed in a hurry and then corrected a minute later. Painters, photographers, creatives. Natalie Ayoub’s work caught our attention. Something in it resisted being scrolled past: images that seemed to be holding still on purpose, films that treat a photograph less as a captured second than as an event with its own duration. We responded.

We say this often at Naso, but it’s worth repeating when given the opportunity to:: most of what ends up in these pages exists because somebody reached out first. A message, a story, a reply from a stranger who decided to answer. Collaboration is not a byproduct of the work: it is the work, and the stories are almost always closer to us than we assume.

Forward

Natalie Ayoub is a Jordanian artist currently based in Rome, where she is pursuing a Master’s in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti. She studied Environmental Health at the American University of Beirut before returning for a second degree in Studio Arts, and for several years now she has worked as a Senior Editor at Kaph Books, where she develops art and cultural publications.

She moves between media — film, photography, gameplay footage, digital imagery, sculpture, sometimes a stone picked up off the ground — with a consistency of question rather than of medium. What follows is a conversation about inheritance and accumulation, about time as an active agent, and about what a seed bank becomes when the thing being preserved is no longer biological.

“Seeing my father draw was what first made me want to draw too”

Before talking about your work, could you tell us a little about yourself and what first drew you towards becoming an artist? Where are you from, and how does home inspire you day to day?

I’m Natalie Ayoub, I’m Jordanian, and I’m currently pursuing a Master’s in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA in Rome. I did my undergraduate studies at the American University of Beirut, where I studied Environmental Health and later decided to pursue a second degree in Studio Arts. Alongside my own practice, I’ve also been working as a Senior Editor at Kaph Books for the past several years, where I work primarily on art and cultural publications. That experience has become integral to rethinking artistic practices and production through researching, editing, contextualising, and working closely with other artists and writers.

My relationship with art really began in childhood, but I think the biggest inspiration for me was my father. He’s an architect, and he was always drawing. He would leave his sketches around the house, so I grew up seeing drawing as something that was simply part of everyday life. Although most of his drawings were architectural sketches, he would sometimes draw portraits as well, and that really encouraged me to start sketching myself. I became particularly interested in drawing the body, anatomy, and portraits — especially eyes, for some reason. So in many ways, seeing my father draw was what first made me want to draw too.

I’ve also lived between several places — Jordan, Lebanon, and now Rome — so the idea of home has always been somewhat mobile for me. It has moved through different cities and countries rather than being tied to one place. At the same time, I continue to find inspiration in my surroundings and in what I’ve learned along the way.

My studies in Environmental Health, for example, made me increasingly attentive to the environment as something that has its own agency, processes, complexities. I think this way of observing the world around me has become an important part of how I approach my practice. In that sense, home for me is less about a fixed location and more about observing and engaging with my surroundings.

A physics teacher, a blackboard, and the idea that art might live anywhere

Looking back at your childhood and early education, were there particular moments, places or people that fundamentally shaped the way you think about making art today?

There were a few people and experiences that really shaped the way I think about art today. One of them was Reem Zawaneh, an art teacher I had during my school years. I believe she had a background in art history, and she was incredibly supportive of me and my ideas. She pushed me to develop my technical skills and encouraged me to take art seriously.

Another person, also from my school years, who had a significant influence on me was my physics teacher, Samia Abif. I was around sixteen or seventeen at the time, and she would constantly sketch illustrations and diagrams on the board to explain different concepts in physics. What inspired me was the way she used drawing as a tool for understanding and communicating something that held complex signifiers and meanings.

That experience made me start reconsidering what art could be, and more broadly, how many things can carry artistic notions and gestures without necessarily being created as works of art. It made me think about art as something that could exist across disciplines, rather than something confined to a particular medium or field.

Between memory and material

Your work seems to exist somewhere between memory and material. Rather than simply using materials as a medium, they often appear to carry their own histories. What attracts you to this relationship?

Yes, I think my work does exist somewhere between memory and material. I don’t think of material as something that is devoid of memory. Every material has had a past life; it has a history that existed before my intervention. In a way, that history is made up of many smaller histories that accumulate into a larger one.

For me, a material has had many lives and will continue to have many lives, even after I interact with it. This could be anything ranging from digital data, video, photography, painting, sculpture, or something as banal as a stone or a rock. I don’t necessarily have a singular material that I return to, because I’m more interested in what a material can do and what it can carry at a particular moment.

I think of memory as something subjective that can also continue to accumulate and change over time. It is a layering of meanings and associations onto something. At any given moment, I find myself encountering a material with a certain history already attached to it, and I have the ability — and often the urge — to intervene in or manipulate it. But my intervention is only one part of that material’s much longer history.

Zooming into time

Many of your works feel intentionally quiet, inviting viewers to slow down rather than consume them quickly. Is creating this sense of stillness something you consciously pursue?

Yes, I think creating a sense of stillness is something I consciously pursue. I became particularly interested in questioning the idea of a photograph and what happens when we think of a photograph as having a beginning and an end — not simply as a single, complete, frozen moment, but as something that unfolds over a period of time, regardless of its duration. This led me to think about the different potentialities of treating time as an active agent, rather than simply as a natural consequence of observing an image, an event, an object, or a material.

Slowness can introduce a certain endurance and allow for a wider range of observation, even at a microscopic level; it feels to me like zooming into time. But I’m interested in temporality more broadly, and in the different forms it can take and the ways in which it can condition a work. Sometimes temporality can become an explicit condition of the work itself; at other times, it can operate through the way an event, image, or material unfolds.

I think this is also why I’m interested in beginning from a particular point without necessarily knowing exactly where I will arrive. The work can develop its own duration and trajectory rather than being entirely predetermined from the beginning. Photography and the virtual world are particularly interesting to me in this regard, because they allow me to access things that might not otherwise be materially or physically accessible, while also creating different ways for those things to exist and unfold.

So the stillness in my work is not necessarily about slowness for its own sake. It is more about creating a different relationship to time — one in which temporality can become part of the work’s internal conditions, and where events are allowed to exist according to their own internal logic and duration.

A personal archaeology of Rome

Living and working in Rome means being surrounded by architecture, archaeology and centuries of accumulated history. In what ways does the city quietly enter your work, even when it isn’t directly represented?

Rome hasn’t entered my work quite the way I expected. It was never a city I’d dreamed of living in, and honestly, living here has been difficult at times. I also don’t live in the historic centre, so my day-to-day experience of Rome is pretty far from the postcard version most people picture.

Whenever I do go into the centre, I notice how much tourism shapes it, and how romanticised the “ancient, historical, monumental” image of the city has become. I’ve questioned that image a lot. There’s a kind of alienation in meeting a place that’s already been so heavily represented before you even arrive. Even walking into churches or historical sites, I’d catch myself expecting something I’d already imagined, and instead noticing my own distance from it.

That alienation eventually pushed me to build my own relationship with the city, through places and experiences that had nothing to do with that obvious image of Rome. Certain streets, neighbourhoods, buildings, encounters, even things I found uncomfortable, slowly became part of how I actually know the city. In a way, I’ve built my own personal archaeology of Rome, less about its monuments and more about the experiences that made it mine.

That’s also had me thinking about the difference between inheriting a history and accumulating one. Rome already carries an enormous amount of history, but my relationship to it is partial and situated; I arrived at a particular moment, from somewhere else, and started layering my own small histories onto a city that already had so many. That tension — between what’s already there and what I’ve actually been able to access and add to it — is probably where Rome shows up most in my work.

The Things That Suspend and Cling to the Void

Could you tell us about a specific body of work — the story behind it, and around it?

ne body of work that is particularly special to me is my film series The Things That Suspend and Cling to the Void (الأشياء التي تعلق وتتشبث في الخلاء).

What makes this work particularly special to me is that it began with its title. I had thought of the title quite randomly, before I really knew what the work was going to become. Once I had it, however, I started dissecting the words within it. What are these “things” that I am referring to? What does it mean for something to cling? How can something suspend? And what exactly is the “void”?

Following these questions gradually led me towards thinking about some very basic categories through which we understand the world. There is what we can directly perceive through our senses — the everyday phenomena we encounter around us. Then there are things we can formulate mathematically, even when they exist beyond our immediate perception or control. Between these different ways of understanding reality, I became increasingly interested in the idea of the phantasm: something that I can imagine or desire, but cannot necessarily access materially. It exists somewhere beyond what I can directly experience.

This also led me to think about belief as another kind of mediator between what I perceive and what I imagine or cannot access. These ideas eventually became less abstract and started to connect back to the events of my everyday life and to the way I experience reality myself.

The process behind the films also became an opportunity to move between different media. I worked with gameplay, photography, and other forms of digital imagery, and I became particularly interested in questioning what a photograph actually is. A photograph appears to capture a single moment, but it also has a duration and exists within a continuous process of movement and transformation. This became another way for me to think about events, and about how something can appear fixed while actually existing within a much larger process.

By the third volume of the series, the investigation had turned increasingly towards my own anatomy. I started thinking about myself as the observer within these events: what kind of body is it that moves through them, perceives them, and accepts a particular reality? So the series gradually moved from a very abstract question contained within a title towards something much more personal.

Afterword: What Accumulates

She opens by telling us that as a child she drew the body, anatomy, portraits — “especially eyes, for some reason.” Years later, by the third volume of The Things That Suspend and Cling to the Void, the films turn towards her own anatomy and towards the question of what kind of body it is that moves through an event, perceives it, and accepts it as real. The girl drawing eyes at her father’s kitchen table and the artist asking what an observer is made of are working the same problem from opposite ends.

Then there is her attention to small things with disproportionate consequences. Across every answer here, she is measuring the gap between how much a thing appears to be and how much it actually does. And she starts before she knows. The film series began with a title that arrived at random and was taken apart afterwards; she describes wanting to begin from a point without knowing where she will arrive, letting a work develop its own duration.

What holds all of it together is the conviction that nothing she works with arrives empty. Materials come with histories. A city comes pre-represented, which is its own kind of obstacle. An image comes with a duration that doesn’t stop at the shutter. Her intervention is one layer added to something already thick, and she is careful to say the thing never becomes hers. That is a modest way to describe a practice. It is also, given how much is moving underneath it, a generous one.

Images Courtesy of the Artist.

Words Copyright of Naso Art Journal

Born to a Yemeni and Indonesian family and raised in Saudi Arabia, Madhi has spent the years since that residency circling one question: who decides what a person is supposed to inherit, wear, remember, or belong to? It runs through his family history, his materials, and the collective he runs with a small group of Saudi artists. Talk to him about any one of these threads for long enough and the same word tends to surface: cliché. He is candid about where it comes from. His own “hybridity”, he says, can read on the surface as a familiar story, one some viewers recognise themselves in and others push back against.

A certain tenderness comes through when he talks about it. “There is a human that comes with it,” he says. It is a small line, said almost in passing, but it carries the weight of his intention: a need to understand the world around him, and the questions of history and belonging that come with it, whether through humour, memes, or a return to tradition and cultural memory. It runs through everything that follows, beginning with the project that first took up this line of enquiry.

On Hybridity and the Cliché of Belonging

Madhi’s first major project set out, in his own words, to accept his own hybridity, though he complicates the word almost as soon as he uses it. Put nationality aside, he says, and hybridity becomes a matter of tribes and family trees, a genealogy that “gets more and more complex” the closer he looks at it.

The work also grew out of questions about freedom of movement as much as belonging: what it means to travel on an Indonesian passport, he says, while his Yemeni friends face more difficulty to reach the same destination. Watching that disparity up close, he says, is part of what pushed him to ask whether the meaning of belonging itself needs rethinking.

When the project showed, people from different backgrounds came through and told him, “I relate to this,” while others pushed back. That reaction, some people seeing themselves in the work and others resisting it, is what Madhi means when he calls the subject cliché. It is a story familiar enough that it risks turning into a theme, when in fact it is a specific area of questioning, one that is very much part of his own life, and clearly, many others around him. Rather than avoid it, then, he leans into it. “If there’s a cliché, when I see it, I would laugh,” he says. “I would like it.”

On Who Gets to Decide

That same curiosity extends to everyday custom. Madhi describes feeling, at times, like he is adapting to “certain standards that I don’t know who’s setting up,” something he traces partly to growing up as what he calls a “third culture kid”.

Being caught between cultures leaves him with more questions than conclusions about where a tradition begins and ends, and who has the right to claim it. It is a live question well beyond the art world too: accusations of cultural appropriation, and the backlash that can follow them, tend to assume that a culture has fixed, defensible edges. Madhi is less certain that it does. He sees a version of the same uncertainty play out in the arguments he has watched, people framing it, he says, as something “taken from this culture or another”. His own answer, offered tentatively, is that culture behaves more like “a language that can be assumed, in a sense,” closer to a shared inheritance than a bordered one.

On What the Hands Remember

Some of what Madhi draws from is more difficult. One earlier project grew out of a family loss, photographs of his aunts that no longer exist, and became an ongoing question over what he is comfortable showing.

That same instinct, working around an absence rather than trying to fill it, carries into a more recent project, shaped like an Indonesian his aunt used to make every birthday, a dish the family has not seen since he passed away, with no photographs left of it either. Madhi has little interest in archival material as a starting point, preferring instead “the pictures that I see in my head,” testing whether memory alone can hold a shape the way a photograph might. What comes back to him is not the dish exactly, but the ritual around it, “chilling with the family, drinking tea, smelling the boukhour.” “When I smell the boukhour, what do I see exactly?” he says. “I see the teapot. I see the people.” It is a question he says he is still working through, in much the same reflective way he talks about the burned photographs.

On Humour and Play

Humour functions, for Madhi, as a working method as much as a mood, and it is bound up with the same instinct that lets him sit inside cliché rather than run from it. He traces the humour back to how people encounter the work in person. At Estiraha’s first exhibition, his friend’s mother came to see the show and found his piece tucked into a corner, a head resting on the floor with the hair still on it. Her reaction, somewhere between shock and disbelief, made him laugh. “It makes you question, it makes you more attracted to the work,” he says, rather than, “if you see something that’s just nice, you say it’s nice, but you wouldn’t want to interact with it.”

This same appetite shows up in how he takes in the world outside the studio. He learns “a lot of things from memes, like news,” he says, pointing to a wider attentiveness to the humour and absurdity of everyday visual culture.

On Estiraha

The same instinct runs through Estiraha, the collective Madhi runs with a small group of Saudi artists. What started as a workaround, a virtual co-working space to keep everyone working together without a shared address, became deliberate after about a year, when the group staged its first exhibition.

Since then, the collective has staged shows named Internet Cafe and, later, Digital Garden, an extension of it staged with KFUPM, all under a standing commitment to stay, as Madhi puts it, “anti-aesthetic, in a sense.” He traces that commitment back to a wider pattern he noticed in the scene around him, one that had narrowed into a fairly fixed idea of what serious work should look like: “minimal.” Against that, Estiraha grew from a much simpler impulse, the sense that “we kind of forgot that art can be fun.”

On What Comes Next

Increasingly, Madhi’s curiosity is turning toward sound, drawn to lullabies in particular and unable yet to say exactly why, and toward a quieter video project built from footage of his grandmother.

Across all of it, family history, humour, memes, sound, the same instinct keeps surfacing: an openness to being inspired by almost anything around him, whether that is his own understanding of belonging or the absurdity of everyday visual culture. “I don’t think I’m making this artwork for myself, it’s more for my generation,” he says. “The questions that I have are stuck in me, and I’m trying to respond to myself.” It is a quiet way of describing what his practice has been doing all along: working through personal questions that, somewhere along the way, turn out to belong to the people around him too.

Cover portrait by Akram Al-Amoudi.

Around Belkahia gathered a small, tightly knit faculty shaped as much by friendship as by shared conviction: the painters Mohamed Chabâa and Mohamed Melehi, alongside Toni Maraini and Bert Flint. Together they rejected academic easel painting and the orientalist figuration that had defined the school under colonial rule, replacing it with an interdisciplinary, Bauhaus-influenced curriculum in which rugs, jewellery, calligraphy, tattoos, tifinagh script and painted ceilings counted as legitimate sources of form, on equal footing with anything taught in a European academy. By 1966, Belkahia, Melehi and Chabâa, whom many had taken to calling the Casablanca Trio, brought their work together in a joint show in Rabat, an abstraction built from Amazigh and African material culture.

Their ideas reached the public most directly in 1969, with Présence Plastique, a manifesto exhibition staged in the Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech as a protest against the state-run Salon du Printemps, a state fair inherited from the colonial period, whose organisers had long dismissed Moroccan artists' work as naive. The artists called it a living exhibition, and for ten dusty, windblown days it stood open to whoever passed through the square, later travelling to Casablanca and, after that, into secondary schools. Writing in French and Arabic in the journal Souffles, the group described wanting to engage the public "outside the closed circuit of the galleries or the salons, places this audience has never entered," and carried that conviction into posters, murals, magazines and street festivals meant to put modern art in front of people who would never set foot in a gallery.

Belkahia's own studio practice became the clearest single record of what the school had been arguing for. From 1963 he broke with oil and the easel altogether, working for more than a decade in beaten copper before turning, from the mid-1970s, to raw hide stretched over shaped supports and stained with henna, walnut and pomegranate bark. Across both materials he carried the same vocabulary forward, tifinagh signs, carpet motifs and tattoo patterns worked into a form of abstraction drawn from Amazigh and North African material culture rather than from any Western movement. He remained director of the school until 1974, and by the time he died in Marrakech in 2014, the Casablanca School he had shaped alongside Chabâa, Melehi, Maraini and Flint had already done what it set out to do: it had given Morocco a modern art history that belonged to Morocco.

Cover artwork: Untitled, 1977, Mohammed Chabâa. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Sharjah Art Foundation.

The two regions have circled each other for twenty years without building a route between them. Christie’s held the first international auction in the Middle East in Dubai in May 2006, hoping for $4.5 million and taking $8.5 million. Roughly $6 million of that came from Indian contemporary art, bought largely with the Gulf’s South Asian wealth.

Here, the East meant Mumbai and Delhi: diaspora money buying diaspora art. It never extended to Seoul, Tokyo or Taipei, and East Asian buying never came the other way. Two conditions have now changed, and both favour building the route.

The market is turning inward

The Art Basel and UBS report for 2026 found global sales up 4% to $59.6 billion, alongside a marked inward turn: UK imports rose 47% while exports fell 39% over the period analysed, as tariffs, shipping costs and political risk pushed collectors toward buying closer to home.

Frieze Seoul is the clearest expression of this. More than 70% of its exhibitors this year are based in Asia-Pacific, and over 50 hold permanent spaces in Seoul. Several long-standing Western participants have stepped back. The fair has quietly become a regional trading floor rather than a Western outpost.

Each region has what the other lacks

The Gulf holds institutional buying power at a scale nowhere else can match. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens on 11 December, the largest museum in the network, with a collection assembled since 2009 and an explicit remit toward underrepresented artists; Qatar’s Art Mill is projected for around 2030. When Art Basel debuted in Doha in February, representatives of more than 85 museums and foundations attended, and reported sales were modest. That is a market where institutions buy and private collectors largely don’t.

Korea is the mirror image: one of the world’s deepest private collector bases relative to its size, and very little institutional acquisition muscle. It is also capital-starved right now. First-half auction sales nearly doubled to 110.8 billion won while the number of lots offered fell 11%, with two works accounting for 23% of the total, as domestic money chased a Kospi that doubled to a record in June. Korean galleries need buyers who are not Korean. Gulf institutions need depth in exactly the twentieth-century material outside the Western canon that Korea and Japan hold.

The taste already matches

At Sotheby’s second Saudi sale in Diriyah in January, 89% of 67 lots sold for $19.5 million with fees, and the Saudi modernist Safeya Binzagr drew more attention than the Picasso in the same room. Korean collecting shows the same instinct in reverse: money concentrates on Lee Ufan, on Dansaekhwa, on work carrying national weight. Both markets pay a premium for cultural proximity. That is not a mismatch. That is a trade.

The vocabulary is already in place. Art Basel frames its Qatar fair as MENASA; Frieze describes its Abu Dhabi edition, opening 19–22 November, as a gateway into the Global South, inviting galleries showing artists from West Asia, North Africa and South Asia. Both are describing a shared corridor that runs between both regions.

What to watch, in order

We look forward to seeing Hafez’s booth: one of the few Gulf galleries ever to trade on an East Asian fair floor.

We are interested to see Spotlight, too. The fair’s new section is given over to twentieth-century artists outside dominant Western canons, and it is hard to think of terrain better suited to the argument this piece is making: the Gulf’s institutions are building collections in precisely that territory, and Seoul is now showing it by the wall.

And Focus, which this year gathers sixteen galleries all founded in 2014 or later, on subsidised stands. That subsidy is the cheapest door into the Asian market any young MENA gallery will find, and the model is spreading: a bursary for younger galleries in Abu Dhabi, waived booth fees in Dubai this spring.

Words Copyright of Naso Art Journal.

Soraya met Sarah through an interview and a series of questions.

Questions, after all, are at the heart of Objects×4, better known by its Instagram handle, @objectsobjectsobjectsobjects, the platform Sarah has been building for just over a year now. Its premise is straightforward: she asks, artists answer, and the conversation becomes part of a growing archive. Interviews go out one to four times a week, spanning every creative discipline. There’s no elaborate structure to it, instead, an independent platform held together by genuine interest in how other people think and make.

What began as a conversation between two people building independent platforms gradually became a friendship, and with it, a kind of working relationship: exchanging names, following each other’s projects, sharing opportunities and showing up when it matters. In an art world still shaped by proximity and access, these informal networks of support can become important structures of their own.

This spring, Sarah opened her first exhibition in Paris. For anyone who had followed Objects×4, 24H felt less like a departure from what she had been doing than an expansion of it. The conversations had simply entered the room.

1,200 images, no names

24H did not initially exist as an exhibition. It began with a passing thought about simultaneity: what other people might be doing at precisely the same moment, elsewhere in the world. People with no connection to one another, living through the same minute in completely different circumstances.

Then came another question: what would those moments look like if they were gathered in one place?

Sarah returned to the method she knew best and put out an open call.

Over two months, more than 1,200 submissions arrived, documenting fragments of ordinary days from across the world. Sarah made the selection anonymously. She had no names in front of her, only an image, its description, a time and a place.

The anonymity was important. Biography, reputation and professional standing were temporarily removed from the equation. What remained was the image and its ability to speak to a particular moment within a shared day.

The final exhibition brought together 139 photographs, arranged chronologically from midnight to midnight. Each image was accompanied by its description, collected in a guide that visitors could carry through the exhibition. Reading was part of the experience of looking. Behind each photograph was a person, a place and a moment that had already passed.

The point, Sarah explains, “wasn’t just to look at time but at what 24 hours looked like as a collective day across the world.”

What followed was approximately a month of selecting, sequencing, writing, installing and navigating the less visible administrative work of putting on an exhibition. For her first curatorial project, Sarah found herself occupying several roles at once. Yet what stayed with her most was the trust involved: hundreds of people had submitted pieces of their lives to someone mounting her first exhibition.

The child on the bicycle

Of the many photographs in 24H, Sarah directed our attention towards the work of Syrian photojournalist Hasan Belal, and particularly his image of a child cycling in front of ruins.

Two of Sarah’s closest friends, Jude and Zaina, both Palestinian, were very moved by the photograph. The image resonated with them as a reminder of circumstances they might have grown up within had their own lives unfolded differently. They wanted to hold onto that connection, and to the realities that continue to shape the lives of others.

“I find it remarkable that a photograph taken by a stranger became their way of seeing or feeling a life they never lived,” Sarah says.

Perhaps this is where 24H becomes about more than time. The photographs document individual moments, but their meaning does not remain with the person who made them. Once encountered by somebody else, an ordinary image can become a point of recognition, memory or identification.

A stranger’s day can, unexpectedly, touch your own.

Accessibility as a Method

When asked about the principles shaping her curatorial practice, Sarah’s answer is immediate: “accessibility, above everything.”

For her, the open call is a working method. It is how Objects×4 began, how 24H took shape, and something she wants to retain as her practice develops.

Anyone can submit.

That openness responds directly to what Sarah sees as one of the art world’s persistent problems: talent and opportunity do not necessarily meet on equal terms.

“I’m looking for is people doing the most with what’s available to them. I really believe there’s so much talent that never gets seen because sometimes the art world gatekeeps, and I’m interested in looking at what exists beyond the conventional.”

Access remains uneven, networks matter, and artists can remain unseen for reasons that have little to do with the quality of their work.

“Underneath it all, the artist comes first,” she says. “Everything I make exists to put them forward.”

It is a simple statement, but one that connects the different parts of her work. Objects×4 gives artists space to speak. 24H asked people to submit without requiring an existing relationship to a gallery, institution or curator.

What comes next

Asked how she would eventually like to be remembered, she hesitates. It is not something she has spent much time considering.

“But if anything, someone who prioritized and listened to artists,” she says. “And if one person somewhere finds something in Objects×4 that makes them want to pursue their own ideas, or inspires something within them, that would be more than enough.”

There is something fitting about returning to listening. Objects×4 began without the certainty that anyone would respond, only the instinct that asking was worthwhile. 24H extended the same proposition on a much larger scale: send me a fragment of your day and let us see what happens when it meets somebody else’s.

For Sarah, Perhaps curating begins with paying enough attention to what someone makes that they start trusting you with their ‘why’, and then caring about that answer to understand where it may belong.

Words copyright of Naso Art Journal. Images Courtesy of the Artist.

“I’m more like a storyteller.

Every work is connected to something that happened to me personally.”

For Ali Eyal, an Iraqi artist whose practice moves across painting, drawing, writing, video, installation, and sculpture, storytelling is shaped by both memory and invention. Having grown up in Iraq through war, sanctions, violence, and instability, Eyal draws closely from his own life, but rarely presents experience as a direct account. Instead, it reappears through fictional identities, imagined collaborations, humour, altered objects, and worlds with their own internal logic. He describes his practice as an open book, with each work forming part of a larger story.

Art has offered him both an emotional and material form of refuge. “It has saved me,” he says, a statement he means, at times, quite literally. In the studio, that refuge takes a different form. “I can heal through the canvas,” he says.

That practice has since become a kind of open book: Eyal numbers his works as pages, “like a page of a book.” “I lived a life that was full of stories,” he says. “It is hard to ignore them.” Rather than reproduce memory directly, he works as a storyteller, changing names and rearranging details as one page leads to the next.

Colour helps make that telling possible. “When I revisit them, the colours make it safer to go into the events,” he says.

He invents when memory becomes difficult, finds humour where he can, changes names, builds other characters, and lets stories take forms that were not available to him when they were first lived.

The full conversation continues exclusively on print.

Words Copyright of Naso Art Journal. Images Courtesy of the Artist.

We have always also wanted to destigmatise parts of the art industry, especially to these emerging artists or artists that do not have access to this type of information in their day to day. How does the price of an artwork climb? Who moves it? What does time do to value?

For an artist, understanding how a price is built means understanding who is shaping a career alongside them: the gallery setting the first number, the collector deciding where a work will live, the curator placing it within a wider conversation, the writer giving it language, and time testing whether all of that attention can hold.

Somebody sets a price

There is no formula waiting to be found. A gallery looks at scale, medium, how much of the work exists, the exhibition history, what sold last season, and picks a number that says: *this is where we think this artist sits.* It’s a position statement dressed up as arithmetic. The number is an opinion, and opinions can be argued with — but only by someone who knows it was an opinion in the first place.

The ladder only goes one way

Prices move in steps, and careful galleries keep those steps small. The reason is structural: a price that visibly drops is brutally hard to lift again. An artist priced too high too fast can stall for years, with unsold work and a stuck ladder. What looks like a gallery being cautious with your money is usually a gallery protecting your next decade.

Who moves it: the buyer, not the cheque

Placement is the part outsiders never see. A work entering a museum collection, a foundation, or the hands of a collector who actually lends will keep working for the artist for thirty years. A work that vanishes into a freeport does nothing at all. This is why galleries turn down more money from the wrong buyer. They aren’t selling an object, they’re building a provenance.

Who moves it: people who never buy anything

Curators, writers, biennial committees, editors, the researcher who footnotes a practice in 2041. Not one of them spends a euro, and all of them move the number. Scholarship is what makes work legible — it hands a practice a lineage and a vocabulary, which is what lets it survive the trend that first made it visible. That’s where a magazine sits in this ecosystem, and we’d rather say so than pretend we’re standing outside it.

What time does

Time is the input nobody can shortcut, and it cuts both ways. It compounds the good things: exhibitions accumulate into a record, a record becomes a reputation, a reputation becomes something a serious buyer will underwrite. It also exposes work that only ever had momentum. Prices built on a waiting list evaporate when the waiting list moves on; prices built on institutional depth tend to hold, and to recover after a quiet decade. The market rewards patience because patience is the one thing it cannot manufacture.

Auction is weather, not climate

The secondary market’s real power is that it is public. Gallery prices are private, so the hammer price becomes the only number anyone can quote and it gets quietly promoted into the truth about a practice. It isn’t. An auction result is not the market’s opinion, it’s the second-highest bidder’s. What actually sustains a career is depth: ten people who want the work, not two. Auction cannot show you depth. It can show you failure, though: a lot that goes unsold is publicly burned and hard to place privately for years afterwards. And the number in the headline does not reach the artist. Resale rights return a small capped percentage in the EU and UK, and nothing at all across much of the rest of the world. A record can make a career or trap it, and it pays for neither.

The price is part of the story

The taboo is meant to keep art safe from the market. Mostly it just protects whoever already understands the market — rarely the artist. Money, in practice, is rent, materials, insurance, the freedom to spend eighteen months on something difficult. Knowing how your price is built is not selling out. It’s authorship, extended to the parts of the career nobody teaches.

At Naso, we believe artists should be able to understand that machinery without being consumed by it. Because knowing how the industry around your work operates does not make the work less sincere. It simply means that when decisions are being made about your value, your trajectory and your future, you are equipped to be part of the conversation.

Words Copyright of Naso Art Journal

After finishing school, Moudarres left Syria to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome from 1954 to 1960, and later continued at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Those years in Europe gave him a formal vocabulary he tested against his own material for the rest of his career, moving from an early, self-taught realism into surrealism, and by the 1960s into an abstract expressionism built from thick, textured brushwork, warm earthen colour, and, in some works, sand folded directly into the paint. His figures, when they appear, are unmistakable: solid, square-shaped heads that draw on Assyrian statuary, Palmyrene funerary busts and Christian iconography, rendered in a manner that feels at once ancient and immediate, as though a Palmyrene face had simply been given a new century to inhabit.

Returning to Syria, Moudarres joined the faculty of fine arts at Damascus University, where he taught for decades and served as dean until 1993. It was there that his path crossed with Louay Kayyali, the Aleppo-born painter of social realist scenes. The two would go on to represent Syrian modern art together at the Venice Biennale, carrying a young national art scene onto a stage it had rarely occupied before.

Moudarres's standing as a founding figure of Syrian modernism rests on more than the biennials and the decades he spent at the front of a classroom, both of which mattered enormously to the generations of Syrian artists who trained under him. It rests on the way he built a visual language out of material that was entirely his own: a childhood village, an Assyrian profile, a strip of Aleppan earth, worked and reworked until they became a vocabulary other Syrian painters could recognise and extend. He died in Damascus in 1999, and his paintings now sit in the archives of institutions such as Mathaf, the Barjeel Art Foundation and the Atassi Foundation, where they continue to be read as one of the clearest records of how a modern Syrian art history came to define itself, in earthen colour, from the ground up.

Cover image: Fateh al-Moudarres, Still Life, 1962, oil on canvas, 89 x 69 cm. Courtesy of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.

Behind many artists is a curator who recognised something before anyone else did. Behind many curators is an artist who trusted them before they had a reputation to lean on. Those relationships are rarely visible to visitors, yet they often shape the work just as much as the exhibition itself.

I met Christina last year through an exhibition she had curated in Paris. What began as a conversation about her practice turned into a friendship. As two young founders trying to build meaningful projects in the arts, we found ourselves exchanging ideas and looking for ways to support one another. Whenever Christina spoke about her latest exhibitions, one artist’s name kept coming up: Yasmina. She never spoke about her simply as someone she exhibited, but as someone she had grown alongside. It made me wonder what happens when an artist and curator build not only exhibitions together, but a lasting friendship. This conversation is the result.

The Origin Story

Christina and Yasmina met in 2022, when Christina was assembling the first exhibition for Hayaty Diaries and knew only that she wanted a Lebanese artist in the room. What she didn’t have yet was a name — so she asked for one.

Christina, do you remember the first time you saw Yasmina’s work? What made you think, I want to show this artist?

“I do remember the first time I saw Yasmina’s work. We had just started conceptualising our first exhibition for Hayaty Diaries, and I knew I wanted a Lebanese artist to be represented in the show. I messaged my godmother’s niece asking for recommendations since she was based in Beirut, and I actually went back through our DMs recently to find the exact message she sent me. She simply put it: “Collage, mixed-media artist. My all-time favorite” followed by Yasmina’s profile.

That was my introduction to her work. What I fell in love with immediately was her sense of materiality: the layering, the texture, and the way she so effortlessly told stories through image and material. There was something incredibly tactile and experimental about her work that I hadn’t encountered before. What drew me in then is the same thing that draws me in now: her extraordinary ability to narrate human experience. Whether she’s exploring her own history, family stories, collective memory, or broader narratives, there’s an honesty to the work that makes people feel connected to it. She has this rare ability to make something feel both intimate and shared.

Of course, I wouldn’t define her practice in exactly the same way today - her work has evolved so much since then (we met in 2022!), expanding into new themes, materials, techniques, ideas, and forms. She’s really stepped into her identity as an ARTIST above all. But what’s so exciting is that despite all that growth and experimentation, the soul of her practice remains unchanged. Watching that evolution has been one of the most rewarding parts of our relationship. It’s what keeps me hooked, keeps me wanting to grow alongside her, and keeps me excited to see where her practice goes next. Yasmina is constantly evolving, constantly challenging herself, yet she remains committed to the emotional honesty and storytelling that made me fall in love with her work in the first place.”

Yasmina, what do you remember about Christina before she became “a curator” in your life?

“Honestly, I knew absolutely nothing about Christina she came into my life. I had never seen her before, we only had a few common friends. But there was something about her presence over the first call that stayed with me. She had that excitement and ability to make me feel seen and understood from the very beginning, and that’s something I don’t forget. Long before she was a curator in my life, she was someone who made me feel that my voice and work mattered.”

If someone had told you then that years later you’d be sitting together discussing your shared history, what would have surprised you most?

“That I’d end up spending time with her parents in Lebanon while she’s abroad! And that we’d discover her house is basically a street away from mine. It feels like one of those things that sounds made up.”

The Leap of Faith

Every curator has a first artist. Every artist has a first curator. Both are, in their own way, an act of faith made before there is any evidence to support it — no track record, no institutional cover, nothing to point to if it goes badly. Their first show together was in London. The first piece sold before Yasmina had even walked through the door.

Christina, why Yasmina?

“Because for me, she has this really rare balance of being exceptionally talented while also being so human. What has always drawn me to Yasmina’s work is her ability to tell stories with such honesty and vulnerability. She’s willing to go to places a lot of artists are afraid to go, and because of that, you feel seen when you encounter her work.

As a curator, that makes working with her incredibly inspiring. She brings so much truth into a space. Visually, her work has this excitement and texture to it, but what I love most is the feeling it creates. There’s a familiarity to it, even though the imagery, the materials, and the way she expresses herself are entirely her own. It feels unique and unexpected, yet so recognizable at the same time. When Yasmina is in an exhibition, you often feel like you’re looking at something you should already know, but at the same time, something you’ve never seen before. And I think that’s a very special thing. Not every artist can do that.”.

Yasmina, what did it mean to be someone’s first artist?

“What’s crazy is that the first piece sold before I had even arrived at the exhibition. It was my first-ever show in London, and I was honestly so confused. I remember thinking, “How is this possible?” But in hindsight, it told me a lot — not only about the work, but about the trust and belief Christina had in it from the very beginning.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a responsibility. It felt like a friendship built on mutual excitement and support. Only later did I realize how special it was that we were experiencing so many firsts together.”

Looking back, was that first exhibition built more on conviction or trust?

“I think trust came first. Neither of us could have known where any of this would lead, but there was an instinctive trust between us. The conviction grew from there.”

Growing Alongside Each Other

Four years is long enough for a practice to change shape entirely. Yasmina’s has moved from photography and collage into objects, embroidery and ceramics; Christina’s eye has taken in hundreds of artists since that first Beirut recommendation. What’s striking is that both of them, asked separately, describe the same thing: an expansion outward that has somehow made the centre clearer rather than harder to find.

Images Courtesy of Christina & Yasmina

Words Copyright of Naso Art Journal

Both readings may be true at once. At the level of aggregate value, the market has indeed recovered, and the recovery accelerated through the first half of this year, with Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips posting a combined seventy percent rise in global auction sales to 6.8 billion dollars, their strongest first half since 2022, driven by a handful of trophy lots. That figure sits comfortably inside the report’s optimism. It says little, however, about the level at which most of the art world actually operates. Stephen Friedman has closed its New York space, while Sean Kelly has scaled back in Los Angeles, both part of a broader contraction as galleries contend with rising rents, fair fees, staffing costs, and shipping expenses, regardless of what happens at the top of an evening sale. The Art Newspaper described this split plainly in June, noting that one season of strong auctions at the very top of the market does very little to change conditions for the dealers and artists working beneath it. The market, then, is not one market but at least two, moving at different speeds, and whether it feels as though it is up or down likely depends on which speed a person happens to be standing in.

Our region carries this same split with unusual clarity. Art Dubai’s twentieth-anniversary edition in May drew a record audience of more than twenty-five thousand visitors. At the same time, the number of participating galleries fell to around fifty, down from roughly one hundred and twenty in past editions, after more than seventy-five international galleries withdrew amid the cost of freight, war-risk insurance, and the wider instability of moving work through the region. In the same season, Christie’s online sale of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art sold ninety eight percent of lots and one hundred percent by value, a result that is structurally strong, and evidence that public appetite in the region has grown even as the trading floor beneath it has thinned.

Q4 will be where this duality is tested in real time, and much of the testing will happen through MENA’s own presence on the calendar. Frieze London and Frieze Masters open the season at Regent’s Park, offering a baseline of an established, if cautious, market. The following week, Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais under its new director Karim Crippa, in the same days that Menart Fair holds its seventh edition under the theme Where Is Home, and Asia Now marks its tenth anniversary at the Monnaie de Paris. The season then moves toward the Gulf, where Frieze Abu Dhabi holds its inaugural edition at Manarat Al Saadiyat, taking over from Abu Dhabi Art, and where, three weeks later, on the eleventh of December, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens on Saadiyat Island, joining the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the recently opened Zayed National Museum to complete a cultural district built over nearly two decades.

Taking a step back, perhaps the more honest way to hold the question is to accept that Q4 may reproduce the same confusion that has defined the year so far: confidence at the level of major sales, institutions, and headline events, alongside a more cautious reality for the galleries and artists working beneath them. It may also begin to tell a different story. With MENA occupying a more visible place across the season’s fairs, museums, and international calendar, the coming months offer a chance to see whether that visibility can generate momentum beyond the top of the market. The season’s significance may ultimately lie in whether the two speeds of the art world begin, even briefly, to move closer together.

Sources:

• Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026

• Art Dubai announces updated gallery list for embattled postponed edition – The Art Newspaper

• Christie’s Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art Online Auction Exceeds Pre-Sale High Estimate – Canvas Magazine

• Art Dubai announces details for revised 2026 edition – ArtReview

• Christie’s and Sotheby’s 2026 half-year results — The Art Newspaper

A new generation of Libyan artists has answered a broken inheritance with dye, thread and clay

In a former tea factory in Bristol last year, Nour Jaouda hung twelve metres of hand-dyed appliqué as a tent. The reference was the khayamiya, the patterned cloth lining tents put up in Cairo’s streets for funerals and Eid: a room that appears for three days and folds away. Nothing about it is political, and that is the point.

What They Inherit

Libya has no state museum of modern art. The first of any kind, Bayt Ali Gana in Tripoli, opened in 2024 in a converted family villa. Fine art degrees exist; the exhibitions, criticism and collecting that turn one into a lineage do not. Shefa Salem studied architecture at Benghazi because it was the closest thing available, and taught herself to paint.

The canon, then, is not inheritable in the usual way. What is inheritable is technique — a dye, a stitch, a script, a way of firing clay. Craft transmits where institutions don’t. Seen that way, this generation’s materiality stops looking like a fashionable turn to textile and starts looking like a solution.

Slow Colour

Jaouda (b. 1997; the Ruskin, then the RCA) hand-dyes cotton in saturated earth pigments, cuts it, layers it, hangs it on steel she fabricates or scavenges. Earlier works traced mashrabiya lattice and mosque arches; several are scaled to the prayer mats around her Cairo studio.

Two things matter formally. Dyeing cannot be undone — colour enters the fibre rather than sitting on it, and the variation belongs to the medium, not the hand. And the Bristol commission marked a shift from citation to collaboration: the appliqué was stitched by craftsmen from Cairo’s tent-makers’ street, to her drawings. That puts a living craft economy inside the work rather than a memory of one, and disposes of the lone-artist-recovering-her-heritage script critics keep reaching for.

The Missing Picture

Shefa Salem (b. 1996, Benghazi) paints large figurative oils in unapologetic realism, chosen, she says, because it is close to people. The reason is a genuine gap: Libya’s deep past — Cyrene, the Amazigh south, Saharan rock art — reaches Libyans as text and oral narrative rather than as pictures. So she supplies the missing ones: the nymph Cyrene as the land itself, a lion at her side; Amazon archers reclaimed from Greek myth.

The genre has an awkward pedigree — nineteenth-century national-romantic history painting, the mode that furnished every European state with an imaginary ancestry. Salem is running it knowingly, and late, in a country whose museums never did.

Letter Before Message

Takwa Barnosa (b. 1998) founded WaraQ in Tripoli at seventeen; she works now from Berlin in paper, installation and sound. Her subject is script — Tifinagh above all. Silent Protests sets calligraphy onto fifty bricks. A letter is a shape before it is a message, and Barnosa keeps working that gap: Tifinagh is geometrically extraordinary and unreadable to most viewers, including most Libyans. On a brick it becomes ornament, architecture and text at once.

The Precedent

Arwa Abouon (1982–2020), Tripoli-born, raised in Montreal, built photographic diptychs from symmetry, repetition and rhythm applied to her own family, and refused the marginalisation the art world wanted from her. Every young Libyan artist now showing internationally works in a space she opened. The writing on this generation has not said so.

Portable by Design

There is no Libyan scene in the geographic sense — only an apparatus, largely private and largely built by women: Noon Arts in London, WaraQ between Tripoli and Berlin, Bayt Ali Gana, Tanarout in Benghazi.

The results: dyed cloth that rolls, paper, bricks, appliqué that folds, ceramic. Objects that pack, ship, install in rooms the artist has never seen. The prayer mat and the tent are both portable architecture. Catalogue essays will call this a metaphor for exile. It reads better as a working method — materials chosen because they behave correctly when the studio is temporary and the audience is elsewhere. That they also carry four thousand years of regional craft is this generation’s luck, and it has been unusually intelligent about spending it.

Words copyright of Naso Art Journal

“I thought it would be nice to be away from my studio, overlooking the sea. Sometimes a change of scenery helps you see yourself more clearly” she says.

With a background in Arabic literature and a diploma in fine art, she describes the impulse to paint as something that felt embedded in her. What followed was a gradual process of unearthing, through which the work became increasingly intuitive, inward-looking, and closely attuned to creativity itself.

“The art that I am making is helping me to introduce myself to myself,” she says.

On the Turning Point

Wedad identifies 2018 as the year in which her relationship with art changed decisively. Until then, her practice had developed alongside teaching, curating, organising gatherings and lectures, and sustained involvement within the artistic community.

“Somehow I began to feel unfulfilled by these frameworks, and wanted to understand my work with more intentionality.”

The shift redirected her attention towards her own practice, opening a period of self-discovery. “I felt inspired to explore my interests, reading, researching, writing within a private and nurturing space that I created on my own terms.”

The studio became a place to retreat to, although Wedad hesitates to call it isolation. She describes this period instead as a cocoon, a space in which she could develop a closer relationship with herself and the work, away from expectation. What emerged were paintings she describes as being “unburdened by performance.”

“If I ever want to meet my authentic self, I can meet her in my paintings, where performance falls away.”

On the Canvas as a Stage

For Wedad, the content of the work is something that her process arrives at, rather than begins with. “The canvas is the stage,” she says. “You set the background, and you unearth it in a way. And then all these conversations and dialogues, they appear.”

She often prepares several canvases at once, building their surfaces through successive layers without deciding what they will become. Some remain in progress for a year or more, their figures emerging gradually and only when the work allows it. “I don’t rush it at all,” she says.“Sometimes I just want to get out of my studio… then the painting will call me,” she says, describing the relationship as “a constant and rich dialogue,” shaped by patience, respect, and reverence.

On Creativity and Presence

When asked about artists or external influences, Wedad replies simply, “For a while, I think I have just been connecting directly to creativity itself, and there is a kind of devotion to that approach,” she says.

This relationship to creativity is closely tied to Wedad’s deeply held spirituality.

“What influences me is the Quran, honestly,” she says. “And how creation on smaller scales and on larger scales all lead into one thing… which is Tawheed, or oneness.”

For all the depth with which she approaches the work, enjoyment remains fundamental to the process. “I’m having fun painting and I’m just enjoying the process,” she says. “I’m doing it just as an expression of being.”

On Opening

When I ask Wedad where her practice is headed, the certainty that has guided much of our conversation gives way to contemplation.

“Wow. Where my practice is headed,” she begins.

She does not offer a destination. Instead, she speaks about reaching a point where the work can begin to move beyond the studio. After about three years of retreating into the privacy of her space, she feels ready for the work to be encountered again. “Some might ask ‘where have you been?’ I am here. I’ve been deep in the work.”

Earlier in our conversation, Wedad speaks of the many artists who remain “hidden jewels in their studios,” producing work away from public attention. There is something particularly fortunate about speaking with her at the moment she is choosing to emerge from her own space.

Talking about her work, Wedad says, “I want people to see it, to feel it. I’m allowing that now.”

The full conversation continues exclusively on print.

Images by Naso Art Journal and courtesy of the artist.

There is a persistent myth that artists produce their best work alone. We imagine the solitary genius in a studio, wrestling with ideas in silence until a masterpiece emerges. It is a glamorized, deeply romanticized image. But while writing this piece, I found myself turning back to art history, where a very different story emerges—one that echoes what we have heard throughout a year of conversations. The greatest artists have almost never worked in isolation. They have always found one another.

Picasso did not invent Cubism alone. His years-long exchange with Georges Braque became one of the most productive creative partnerships in modern art. They visited each other’s studios almost every evening, comparing paintings, challenging one another, borrowing ideas, disagreeing, and ultimately inventing an entirely new visual language together. Braque later described them as “mountain-climbers roped together.”

The Impressionists were a community before they became a movement. The Abstract Expressionists gathered nightly at the Cedar Tavern. The Bloomsbury Group blurred the boundaries between writers, painters and critics. Black Mountain College produced generations of artists because it understood something simple: proximity creates possibility.

Today, however, the structures surrounding artistic careers often encourage the opposite.

For emerging artists, success is frequently presented as a linear progression: graduate, secure gallery representation, produce exhibitions, enter collections. The gallery becomes the destination.

Yet increasingly, that destination feels less certain.

Commercial galleries continue to play an essential role in the ecosystem: they introduce artists to collectors, finance ambitious production, and build long-term careers. But the economics of the market have become increasingly difficult. Rising operating costs, global competition, art fair expenses, and a saturated exhibition calendar have forced many galleries to become more selective and commercially risk-averse. The question, then, is not whether galleries matter.

It is whether they can still provide everything an emerging artist needs. Increasingly, the answer seems to be no…

What galleries sell is visibility.

What they cannot manufacture is belonging. No sales strategy replaces watching another artist solve a problem you’ve been wrestling with for months.

No collector dinner replaces spending six weeks living alongside fifteen people from different countries, exchanging references over breakfast and arguing about painting until midnight.This is where residencies and artist-run spaces quietly become some of the most important institutions in contemporary art.

Unlike galleries, whose primary responsibility is necessarily tied to the circulation of artworks, residencies invest in the conditions from which artworks emerge. Their product is not an exhibition. It is time, experimentation, conversation and trust.

The Alliance of Artists Communities, which represents hundreds of residency programs worldwide, describes residencies as places centered on creative process rather than product, where the most meaningful outcomes are often personal transformation, experimentation and long-term artistic development rather than immediate public presentation. That distinction matters.

Because artistic growth is rarely measurable in sales

This is perhaps why younger artists increasingly describe residencies as career-defining moments.

Not because they lead directly to representation but because they change how artists think.

You leave with new collaborators. You discover a curator who understands your work. Someone recommends a book that shifts your entire practice. Someone introduces you to a future collector. Years later, you find yourselves exhibiting together in another city.

Careers rarely unfold through dramatic breakthroughs. They accumulate through relationships. Perhaps this also explains why so many of history’s artistic breakthroughs emerged from shared places rather than isolated studios.

Montmartre.

The Bauhaus.

Black Mountain College.

Downtown New York in the 1970s.

The Young British Artists sharing warehouse studios in East London.

Ideas spread socially before they become historically significant.

Modern art itself was built through exchange. Artists travelled, met in cafés, academies and studios, argued, copied, challenged and inspired one another across cities and countries.

Perhaps the future for emerging artists is less about asking, “How do I find a gallery? and more about asking, Where do I find my people?”

For decades, the art world has treated community as something secondary, a pleasant addition once careers are established. Representation may still come. But community cannot be outsourced.

Words copyright of Naso Art Journal

Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin presented Dépouiller during the Night of the Year at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026. The photobook, co-authored with Olivier Truchet, is currently in the making.

NAJ: Let’s start with you — where you’re from, and how you’d describe your practice.

EBE: “I’m sometimes a photographer, sometimes a curator, sometimes a writer, and sometimes an anthropologist. I was born in a small city in the Nile Delta, then moved to Cairo when I was a teenager. I’m mostly interested in stories and how narratives are constructed across different social dynamics. I can say all the fancy words about how sophisticated my practice is, but I think it all boils down to observing slowly and carefully. Specifically in these times, to observe slowly and carefully can be one of the most radical things to do.

To allow myself to slow down, I’ve adopted an entirely analogue process — I sometimes get to see a photograph a few months after making it. I make a photograph, then wait to have the time to develop the film, then wait to handprint the negative in the darkroom. This prolongs the observing as much as possible, by being completely immersed in who or what I’m standing in front of, and not being trapped inside a camera. I don’t want my attention diverted by a digital screen that shows me instantly how things look. I want my camera to be an extension of how I see — not for my vision to be an extension of how my camera sees.”

NAJ: Why photography, of everything you could do?

EBE: “Because photography is very strange if you really think about it. It’s a medium that can be very violent, invasive, reductive, and quite literally flattening. But I find it very exciting to figure out how to walk through that minefield and still bring out work that is genuine, reflective, and dignifying to whatever — or whoever — is on the other side of my camera.”

NAJ: Your work is often described as dancing on the line between documentary and fiction. What first pulled you to the medium?

EBE: “I’m experimenting with world-building, with reimagining how we shape and are reshaped by our surroundings. I got into it as a way to make sense of where I was and to establish a sense of belonging. As a child, I had to move houses several times with my family, so photography became a method for making a house feel more like a home. Then it snowballed and became much more complicated.”

NAJ: How does where you come from shape the way you see?

EBE: “Being Egyptian and living in Cairo have definitely shaped the way I see. Living in Cairo is a daily practice of figuring out your relationship with your surroundings — and that’s exactly what I do photography for. Cairo keeps giving you very rich visuals, left and right, which is probably what compelled me to look beyond that layer for something more tranquil.”

NAJ: Tell us about Dépouiller, the work you brought to Arles.

EBE:”It was a very small and humble participation in the festival. The team approached me to present my latest work, Dépouiller, during the Night of the Year. It’s a photobook in the making that merges documentary photography with fiction writing. It navigates a city across two different timelines, through the eyes and the words of two seemingly polar observers: a father and a son who almost never met. The project examines how the urban and the familial shape one another. It argues that our relationship to one informs the other — through joined processes of construction and deconstruction, familiarity and estrangement, attachment and indifference, stability and precariousness.”

NAJ: What was the impulse behind it?

EBE:”I started the project in 2025 during an art residency at La Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille. Being in Marseille was inspiring, especially the people I met there. I wanted to expand my area of engagement beyond my local context. I grew up in Egypt seeing French and British photographers engage with the Egyptian context without ever having to justify it — it seemed natural to see Egypt through the eyes of foreign photographers. I want it to become natural, too, to see and think about Europe through the eyes of artists from the global south.”

NAJ: Is there one encounter from the work you hold especially close?

EBE: “The first time I met this man — shortly after I walked into his bookshop in Marseille and introduced myself as a photographer — he told me that photography had ended, and no one should be a photographer anymore. He said there were too many photographs in the world now, that it had become so easy it meant nothing. I asked to take his portrait. He said he didn’t care.

I went to Paris to develop and print the photographs I’d been making in Marseille, then came back to give him his portrait. He grunted, then smiled. Later he told me the portrait had revealed something to him about himself that he thought he’d never recognise again. I showed him other photographs I’d made in Marseille — the city he was born in and has lived in for almost seventy years. Now Olivier Truchet, who thought photography had ended, is the co-author of my first photobook in the making.”

Images Courtesy of Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin

Words Copyright of Naso Art Journal

Part collector, part dealer, and increasingly a cultural advocate, Haider represents a generation that has come of age alongside the Gulf’s extraordinary cultural transformation. Unlike earlier collectors who often built collections in relative isolation, his generation has grown up amid museums, biennials, art fairs, foundations, and an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem of cultural production. Yet what distinguishes Haider is not simply his proximity to this growth, but the sense of responsibility with which he approaches it.

When asked what first drew him to collecting, his answer reveals something deeper than market interest.

“Growing up in an artistic environment, I wanted to decorate my room with something different than football players. I ended up having both artworks and pictures of football players.”

The anecdote is disarmingly simple, but it speaks to a larger truth: collecting often begins not with strategy, but with affinity. What followed, however, evolved into a commitment to preservation.

“What motivates me is that I want to support the next generation of artists, and to prevent them from being forgotten like what almost happened to a lot of pioneering artists from the Gulf.”

That concern for historical continuity sits at the center of Haider’s practice. In a region where conversations frequently focus on what is new, he remains equally invested in what risks are being overlooked.

His understanding of collecting has also been shaped by witnessing the maturation of Gulf institutions. Rather than viewing collections as private holdings alone, he increasingly sees them as part of a larger cultural infrastructure.

“I understood the importance of placing artworks in institutional collections, and I also started to understand the regional mindset when it comes to collecting—whether it’s collecting with a purpose or based on an individual’s personal taste.”

This awareness reflects a broader shift occurring across the GCC. The collector is no longer merely an owner of objects, but a participant in shaping cultural memory. Collections today increasingly intersect with museums, archives, educational initiatives, and public scholarship.

The full article is exclusively in print, Naso Art Journal Issue 3.

Words Copyright of Naso Art Journal

Images Courtesy of Forat Gallery

“They trust me with their art, I trust them with my home.”

In AlUla, N.E.S.T. occupies a space between home, gallery, salon, and gathering place. Founded by Saudi artist Abdulmohsen Albinali, the New Experimental Salon for Travelers is an independent, artist-led experimental salon and residential gallery shaped through hosting, exchange, and artistic trust.

The project emerged from Albinali’s own experience as an artist. After years spent studying abroad and participating in residencies, he moved to AlUla, where the idea of creating a space for artists began to feel increasingly urgent. What took shape was not planned as a conventional gallery. N.E.S.T. began inside a house, and even before Albinali had fully moved in, it was already being used to host artists. “Before I even lived here, an artist lived here and I hosted,” he says.

On AlUla as a Place of Passage

For Albinali, N.E.S.T. is inseparable from AlUla. The name itself carries this relationship through the word “travelers,” placing movement and passage at the centre of the project. AlUla’s history as a crossroads informs how he thinks about the space, particularly through older traditions of travelers, pilgrims, and safekeeping.

“There was this tradition where the pilgrim would leave their earthly possessions with the locals who trusted them and then they would continue their spiritual journey to Mecca and Medina,” he explains. “So there is this old tradition of keeping things safe for outsiders. And I think this extends really in the philosophy of what I do here. It’s the same thing, but from an artistic lens.”

On Home, Hospitality, and the Salon

N.E.S.T. operates through a deliberate closeness between domestic and public life. Visitors may enter through the house, remove their shoes, cross the living room, and move toward a courtyard performance. Artists may stay in the space, watch films, hold screenings, or gather on the rooftop for talks and dinners.

The space is guided by Arab hospitality, but also by the vulnerability of opening one’s home. “In this idea of hosting someone, you’re trusting them, you’re having them in your home, you’re giving them the keys,” he says. “So there’s a lot of trust. They trust me with their art, I trust them with my home.”

On Independence and the Possibility of Saying Yes

Within AlUla’s expanding cultural landscape, N.E.S.T. is shaped by its ability to respond naturally to the people who pass through it. “I kept seeing so much talent pass through AlUla, and I thought, if you’re already coming here, why not stay? Why not show something?”

The full editorial continues exclusively on print.

Muharraqi refused to remain within a single style. Across his career, he worked through realism, cubism, abstraction, and surrealism, allowing each to serve a different way of thinking. Familiar subjects such as pearl divers, horses, fishing boats, villages, or palm groves often appear alongside fractured bodies, hybrid creatures, symbolic imagery, and dream-like compositions. His paintings shift between the recognisable and the imagined, revealing an artist interested as much in inner experience as in the visible world.

Exhibiting throughout the Gulf, the Arab world, Europe, and Asia, Muharraqi belonged to a generation of artists who laid the foundations for modern art in the region while remaining in conversation with wider international movements. His work continues to demonstrate that modern Arab painting cannot be understood through a single aesthetic or narrative, but through practices that embraced experimentation, contradiction, and an openness to multiple ways of seeing.

Cover artwork by Abdullah Muharraqi, Oil and acrylic on wood, 1992.

At the intersection of scholarship, connoisseurship and strategic collecting sits Yelmani Fine Art Consultancy (YFAC), a consultancy dedicated to shaping collections with lasting cultural relevance. Offering bespoke advisory services across collection management, market intelligence, curatorial strategy, appraisals and acquisitions, YFAC works closely with both emerging and established collectors to navigate the complexities of the international art market. Spanning Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art, the consultancy approaches collecting not simply as the acquisition of objects, but as the careful construction of meaningful cultural legacies.

The Invisible Architecture of Art

While artists produce the work, it is often those operating behind the scenes who ensure that the work enters history. Acting as custodians of artistic narratives, they negotiate, authenticate, advise and build relationships that stretch across institutions, galleries and collectors. It is a profession that demands scholarship as much as diplomacy.

For Yelmani, this role has never been about facilitating transactions alone. Reflecting on nearly two decades inside the international art market, he describes working “at the absolute machine room of the international art market,” where his conviction has remained unchanged: “art is far more than just an asset. It is a language, a legacy, and one of the most profound ways we have of understanding the world.” Rather than positioning himself as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, he emerges as a custodian of cultural continuity, illustrating how the invisible labour behind exhibitions often determines which artists become part of history and which quietly disappear from it.

A New Cultural Cartography: Working Between Europe and the Middle East

Few regions have reshaped the contemporary art landscape as rapidly as the Gulf. What was once perceived as an emerging market has become one of the most dynamic sites of institutional investment, collecting and cultural production. For YFAC, establishing its headquarters in Dubai was never simply a logistical decision but a reflection of a broader conviction that the geography of contemporary art is fundamentally changing. Yelmani describes Dubai as “one of the most dynamic cultural crossroads in the world right now,” explaining that its position allows the consultancy to operate fluidly across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. More significantly, he insists that “it’s not a base of convenience; it is a strategic, deeply personal choice.”

Rather than viewing the Middle East as a peripheral market, Yelmani argues that it has become one of the principal architects of tomorrow’s cultural landscape. “What took Europe decades to build,” he observes, “the Gulf is constructing in years—and building it with genuine seriousness of purpose.” The rapid emergence of museums (Louvre, Guggenheim, Duma) , biennials (Sharjah), foundations (Barjeel) and international art fairs (Frieze, Art Dubai) represents more than cultural infrastructure; it signals an ambitious investment in intellectual capital and long-term artistic dialogue. For YFAC, these developments are not simply evidence of economic growth but of a region redefining its place within global art history.

What excites him most, however, is not the scale of institutional development but the evolution of collecting itself. He notes that Middle Eastern collectors are increasingly moving beyond regional frameworks, creating collections in which Arab artists exist in dialogue with leading international figures. “We aren’t interested in provincial tastes,” he explains. “We build global dialogues on the same wall.” By introducing Middle Eastern artists into European collections while simultaneously bringing Western artists into Gulf collections, YFAC positions itself as a cultural bridge rather than a market intermediary. As Chabah Yelmani concludes, “for the first time in modern art history, cultural influence is becoming genuinely multipolar.” The conversation, he suggests, no longer belongs exclusively to historical capitals such as Paris, London or New York.

The Middle Eastern Market Beyond the Headlines

Discussions surrounding the Middle Eastern art market frequently gravitate towards record-breaking acquisitions, museum openings or international investment. Yet Yelmani suggests that the region’s most significant transformation is occurring beneath these headlines. Comparing collectors across Europe, North Africa and the Gulf, he notes that younger Middle Eastern collectors approach art with “a massive hunger, pure curiosity, ambition, and a refreshing absence of the creative bias that sometimes stiffens European taste.” Rather than inheriting established collecting traditions, many are, as he puts it, “collecting to build one.” They are investing not only in artworks but in museums, foundations, residency programmes and educational initiatives that strengthen the wider cultural ecosystem.

For Yelmani, this distinction is fundamental. He points to the work of the Barjeel Art Foundation as evidence of a collecting philosophy rooted in public engagement rather than private ownership. He praises its scholarly approach, describing it as “a living masterclass in how a private passion can become a public, intellectual legacy.” Such examples illustrate a broader shift in which collections increasingly function as educational and cultural resources, challenging conventional assumptions that collecting is solely an expression of wealth or prestige.

Looking ahead, Yelmani believes the next generation of collectors will be defined less by financial capacity than by intellectual curiosity. “Curiosity. Above everything else, curiosity,” he says, arguing that while expertise can be acquired and market data outsourced, “what you cannot outsource is cultural intelligence.” The collectors who will shape tomorrow’s museums and institutions, he suggests, will be those who seek first to understand rather than simply to own. In many ways, this observation encapsulates YFAC’s wider philosophy: that the future of the art market lies not in speculation, but in scholarship, dialogue and the long-term cultivation of cultural legacy.

Read the full article in the next print edition.

Images Courtesy of YFAC. Words Copyright of Naso Art Journal.

For this reason, the region is difficult to read through market language alone. Fairs, auctions, gallery districts, and major collecting centres may offer useful points of reference, but they do not fully account for how artists gain visibility, or how their work is preserved, discussed, collected, and moved between contexts. Across the Levant, the market is closely tied to forms of cultural work that often sit beside or around commercial exchange, from archives and museums to cultural centres, private collections, educational initiatives, and independent platforms.

Beirut remains the clearest place to begin because many of these forms have existed there together. Its role in the Levantine art market is not only linked to galleries and collectors, but to a broader cultural field shaped by museums, foundations, publishing, criticism, archives, and independent initiatives. The Sursock Museum, whose collection includes works by predominantly Lebanese artists from the late nineteenth century to the early 2000s, holds an important place in this history. Its collection points to the relationship between institutional memory and artistic value, where modern and contemporary practices are preserved, studied, and made available within a public framework.

Beyond the museum, Beirut’s cultural life has also been shaped by spaces that operate outside strictly commercial models. Ashkal Alwan has played an important role in supporting artistic production, critical thinking, education, and exchange between practitioners and institutions. The Arab Image Foundation offers another example through its work with photographic collections, archives, preservation, and access. These spaces matter to the market because they help shape the conditions around artistic practice. They support research, produce discourse, preserve histories, and create forms of recognition that may later enter commercial or institutional circulation.

Beirut’s position is also shaped by the present conditions under which its cultural workers continue to operate. Economic crisis, political instability, and repeated disruption have altered the ways artists, galleries, institutions, and collectors work. The city continues to carry significant cultural weight, while its artistic life increasingly moves through neighbouring cities, diasporic networks, regional collectors, temporary exhibitions, institutional collaborations, and the movement of artists themselves.

Amman’s art scene has developed through a steady network of institutions, galleries, collections, educational spaces, and design-led cultural practices. Its cultural economy is quieter than Beirut’s, but it remains significant to the wider Levantine field. Darat al Funun, founded as a home for the arts and artists from the Arab world, has long supported exhibitions, residencies, research, and public programming in Amman. The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, with a permanent collection of more than 3,000 works from the Islamic and developing worlds, offers another institutional anchor through which art is collected and preserved.

Amman’s gallery landscape adds to this sustained cultural economy. Spaces such as Wadi Finan, Orient Gallery, and Jacaranda Images have helped build visibility for artists in Jordan and the wider region. Their role is not only commercial. In markets where public infrastructure is limited, spaces like these often become places of introduction, mediation, education, and continuity. They support artists, build collector relationships, stage exhibitions, and create forms of recognition that may later travel elsewhere.

Amman Design Week can be read within this longer cultural landscape rather than as a standalone event. Its return in October under the theme Accumulations offers a timely frame for thinking about the city, while also pointing to forms of work that have been developing over time. Through design, craft, architecture, publishing, material culture, and public programming, it brings together practices that already shape Amman’s cultural economy.

Palestine and Syria complicate the language of a regional art market in different ways. Palestine cannot be approached through the same market terms used for Beirut or Amman, particularly in a context shaped by occupation, fragmentation, restricted movement, and the ongoing struggle to preserve cultural life. Institutions such as the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, the A. M. Qattan Foundation, the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, and Riwaq work across history, education, archives, architecture, research, and public programming. Their work belongs to a broader cultural infrastructure, where preservation, study, access, and public engagement carry a significance that cannot be measured through market development alone. Syria brings another history into this conversation. Damascus carries an important modern artistic legacy, shaped by artists, schools, exhibitions, and cultural institutions that formed part of the wider history of Arab modernism. In recent years, the contemporary visibility of Syrian art has been deeply affected by war, displacement, and the interruption of local infrastructure, with many Syrian artists now circulating through Beirut, Amman, Istanbul, Dubai, Europe, and other diasporic contexts.

Seen together, these contexts expand what can be understood as market infrastructure across the Levant. The fair, the auction, the gallery district, the museum acquisition, and the private collection remain useful points of reference, but they do not account for the full range of cultural work through which artistic value is formed. Archives, foundations, artist-run initiatives, cultural centres, educational programmes, diasporic networks, and the preservation of modern artistic histories are all part of this field. Beirut remains historically central, while Amman, Ramallah, and Damascus each contribute differently to the way art is supported, held, and carried across contexts. Rather than forming around a single market centre, the Levantine art market continues to take shape through the relationships that connect these places, and through the cultural work that allows artistic practices to be recognised and carried forward.

Cover image courtesy of Amman Design Week.