Excavations of the Moment

Emirati artist Sara Alahbabi, Sharjah-based Syrian artist Talin Hazbar, and Catalan artist Enric Ansesa

We often think of excavations as uncovering the past or reaching toward distant futures. But in this exhibition, excavation becomes a way of paying close attention to the present. To excavate is to pause, to notice what lies beneath the surface of everyday life. It’s an act of revealing—fragile and strong, hidden and familiar. It’s a way of recognizing memory not just as something we recall, but as something that shapes the spaces we live in.

The works in this exhibition explore how land, silence, memory, and form influence how we exist in the world. Rather than imagining what doesn’t yet exist, these artists focus on what is already here. They invite us to slow down and connect more deeply with the materials and traces that surround us—things that are both fleeting and enduring.

The practices of Sara Alahbabi, Talin Hazbar, and Enric Ansesa come together within this idea of excavation.

Sara Alahbabi draws on the architectural memory of her hometown of Abu Dhabi through sculptural forms that feel both ancient and alive. In her new series of sculptures, Alahbabi explores what it means to engage with minimalism as a woman artist, challenging the purity and austerity often associated with the form. Her works refuse stillness. They animate the spaces they occupy, inviting contemplation while holding tension and quiet humor. Through repetition and variation, she navigates a language of spatial intimacy and subtle distortion, excavating the material memory of the city’s façades and reshaping them through her own artistic lens.

Talin Hazbar works with natural materials like coral, clay, and stone—elements that resist being pinned to a single moment. Her delicate installations feel like landscapes suspended between collapse and renewal, treating the earth as a living, breathing body. Her practice turns to cycles of erosion, sedimentation, and repair, insisting on intimacy with the now rather than speculating on distant futures. Hazbar's forms hold the marks of time and pressure, yet remain open to transformation. They embody both fragility and resilience, inviting the viewer into a space of quiet reflection. Through this sensitivity to material and temporality, she offers a vision of excavation that is tactile, bodily, and grounded.

Enric Ansesa approaches excavation through the disciplined and lifelong study of black—not as emptiness, but as a concentrated field of presence. His abstract works, shaped by silence, repetition, and fracture, are rooted in the Catalan post-dictatorship context, where abstraction became both an aesthetic choice and a coded language of resistance. For Ansesa, black is not symbolic but essential. It clears away noise and creates a space for deep attention. His practice treats silence as density and fracture as memory—visible marks that acknowledge rupture and resist forgetting. 

Rather than narrating, his work offers a space to remain with what already exists. In the tension between visibility and disappearance, his surfaces speak through absence, inviting viewers to listen to what remains unsaid.

Excavation, for Ansesa, is not an act of discovery but of presence. It is about inhabiting the moment fully, and in doing so, keeping memory alive.

Together, these artists offer excavation as a way of seeing — an attentive and thoughtful approach to uncovering what already exists. Rather than seeking spectacle, they create quiet moments of transformation, where absence becomes form and vulnerability opens a path to renewal. On these shifting grounds, the future is not a distant promise — it begins here, in the momentarily monumental traces that surround us: fleeting yet enduring.

Curatorial text by Metha Naser Alsaeedi