Infrared

In Infrared, works coalesce around the observer effect, in which a wave becomes a particle and the body becomes a tongue through ritual, accumulation, and the ambient heat of the gaze. It charts a feedback loop of distributed power and the scopic metallurgy it enacts: how being seen, and knowing we are being seen, fundamentally alters both our behavior and our internal states. These are works about looking and being looked at, from rear window voyeurism and feeling awkward at the function to being watched from above. Surveillance, whether by family, state, the divine, or each other, is recast here as tender protection that suggests Philip Larkin writing about jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet: on me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.

 

Copper suffuses the show: as palette in Lubnah Ansari‘s poetic invocation on sandpaper and MG‘s patinated canvases and as memory of the Gulf’s first extractive industry which transformed the region much like Amna AlMemari‘s millefeuille of oil and financial marketplaces later would. And in Andrew Riad‘s pipe and wire sculptures, the raw material functions as a synecdoche for both language and the chanting, dancing body.

 

In Ancient Egyptian mythology, the goddess Hathor was born from the eye of the sun god Ra and transmuted from a terrifying whirlwind of destruction into a gentle universal maternal force. In the Book of the Dead, she receives the souls of the deceased into her womb as they transition into the afterlife. Like the Sufis many millennia later, her worship was grounded in music, hypnotic movement and intoxication to reach for a kind of cosmic harmony. In his work, Riad offers a kind of syncretism that marries the sistrum, or soothing holy rattle wielded by Hathor’s priestesses with the milk, dried roses and fragrant rosewater of more modern ritual baths and Coptic liturgical traditions. Coptic, the final descendant of the ancient tongue, is considered a dead language today, relegated to the Church. In Coptic Burial (2026), two resin blocks holding dried rosebuds and the entire Coptic alphabet rest side by side, like skeletons discovered holding hands even in death. But much of Riad’s practice is grounded in a kind of transverse Hathor worship, reviving the Bohairic, or Sea Coptic dialect through the musical, somatic, and cheironomic hand gestures that were inherited from its ancient ancestors, as in the rhythmic video poem DANCE! (2026) and the performance Impermanence (To Continue Dancing) (2026).

 

Let’s move from the Nile to 10th century Baghdad, where the Sufi mystic Mansour Al Hallaj was executed on the banks of the Tigris. Just as Riad looks to return to the very nucleus of language to worldbuild from it, Al Hallaj emphasised the batin, or hidden, inward meaning—an infrared spirituality-considering the letters of the alphabet as the building blocks of reality. Like Hathor worship, Al Hallaj’s esotericism was predicated on the dissolution of the ego, of the I, into the divine source. We might find analogues here in Kashmiri Shalvism, which similarly considered letters (matrikas, or the mothers) to be the sonic masonry of the universe, or the radical nondualism of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which posited a divine power that was distributed in every living thing, in every human, animal, and leaf blade. Al Hallaj is best known for his statement “Ana Al Haq,” or “I am the Truth,” which was—and remains-considered deeply blasphemous. Not unlike the way that the Fatimid Sultan reportedly cut off the tongue of anyone heard to be speaking Coptic, Al Hallaj’s own tongue was pulled out to silence his refrain. Yet mystic legend holds that even after his body was reduced to ashes, the phrase could still be heard echoing from the blood soaked earth.

 

Ansari takes this episode as a starting point for her ongoing research project Mere Dil, Mere Musafir. Afterlives of Haq to focus in on the word haq itself, and explore its granular migrations across South and Southwest Asia. Through sculpture, photography, film, and mixed media works, she considers how meaning both mutates and persists across time and geography. In the photographic series Sand Scale (2026), and the resin and sand sculptures Mere Dil Mere Musafir (2026) and Mere Zubaan Mere Musafir (2026) the tongue becomes sand, or is it the other way around? In particular, the titles reference one particular lyrical afterlife in Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem Hum Dekhenge (we will see, or perhaps we shall witness) adapting Al Halla’s statement. Wake of Haq (2026) meanwhile returns to the Proto-Semitic etymology of haq, which initially had connotations of scratching and engraving which segued over time to mean truth, as the ultimate indelible inscription. Except here, Ansari etches into sandstone using an invented alphabet, with its residue presented alongside. And the video work JHARAJHARA (2026) remains hidden from public view, accessible-or not-only following a timed discussion with the artist.

 

We see a different kind of interiority in MG’s canvases, which imagine spaces which the public doesn’t usually have access to. Your neighbours living rooms, for example in The Apartment (2026), and all the myrlad stories and lifeworlds they might hold. In her Collecting the Collectors series, she extends this exploration into the private interiors of art collectors, disrupting the spatial logic of the canvas to consider what gets centered in the frame, and what gets cropped out. Here, it is the artworks and objects themselves that preen and perform for the viewer, becoming participants in their own mythmaking. Theoretical and art historical references abound: Roland Barthes, Hélène Cious, Nam Jun Paik’s TV Buddha, Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés, a Sol LeWitt. Throughout, there’s a quiet indexing of grief too following the passing of a pet: looking for a loved one that should be there and seeing nothing.

 

Finally, we scale up again in Amna AlMemari’s Tarflowers series of fictionalised ecologies. Here, she considers the sweeping transformations that oil wrought upon the Arabian Peninsula to fashion a new, wholly imagined terrain, one that is imagined from within and not by Western journalists. Camouflage, in the form of fragments layered until they become illegible like Zalgo text, is considered as a kind of protective armor and strategy that resists easy interpellation and quantisation of Identities. Rather, like MG’s objects these terrains resist easy framing to insist upon their own storles, their own histories.