Rooted Echoes

Rooted Echoes brings together the works of Yasmine Al Awa, Ahed Al Kathiri, and Zahra Jewanjee. Each artist, through her distinct visual language, explores memory, identity, and belonging. Curated by Nadine Khoury, the exhibition emerges from the artists’ participation in NIKA Project Space’s summer open studio residency.

 

At its core is a shared impulse to retrieve and reframe cultural inheritance. The works speak to familial and ecological lineage, reflecting how memory can be embodied and materialized across media, framing it as a living archive.

 

Yasmine Al Awa’s hyperrealistic paintings depict intimate corners of her paternal grandparents’ home. Through furniture, textiles, and objects rooted in her Syrian identity, she crafts quiet narratives of remembrance. These still interiors serve as both personal archives and testaments to how space and objects become vessels of self.

 

Ahed Al Kathiri’s practice merges textile, sound, and performance to explore her Yemeni heritage. Using fabrics from Yemen and recordings of her grandmother singing traditional hymns, she creates a sensory experience that carries memory through sound. The hymns are storytelling through song, passed down through generations. A score on the wall maps how sound travels through the mouth, tracing the movement of words through breath. By echoing her grandmother’s voice in a public setting, Ahed extends a sense of vulnerability, carrying intimate memory into a collective space and offering it to a new generation. In conversation with Yasmine’s stillness, Ahed’s work becomes a living echo. Together, they form a dialogue between visual silence and oral legacy.

 

Zahra Jewanjee approaches identity through ecology, centering her ongoing investigation into the Ghaf tree, a symbol of endurance and rootedness in the UAE. Through this lens, she reflects on displacement, adaptation, and transformation. Her textured works prompt us to consider what it means to be uprooted yet still belong, revealing the quiet strength in grounding oneself amid change. Her large raw canvases pull the viewer into the landscape, where the painted Ghaf tree quietly stands out.

 

Across geographies and genealogies, these artists chart deeply personal cartographies of home. Their works suggest that belonging is not a fixed point, but a process in motion. Rooted Echoes layers past and present, memory and material, voice and silence.