Safwan Dahoul - Ayyam Gallery

16 May | 4 July 2026 - UAE

SAFWAN DAHOUL @ AYYAM GALLERY

The Eye: An Aperture Into the Soul

16 May |  4 July 2026

AYYAM GALLERY DUBAI Units 11, Alserkal Avenue Exit 43 of SZR Street 8, Al Quoz 1 Dubai, United Arab Emirates - T: +971 4 3236242

Safwan Dahoul, Dream 279, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 180 x 200 cm

Join us for the vernissage tomorrow 16th of May, from 6 - 9 PM, in presence of the artist.

For much of the past three decades, Safwan Dahoul’s work has consistently taken shape within the same austere interior: a sparse, almost anonymous, monochromatic room, most often empty of any narrational or descriptive detail. Within this pared-down room, different phases and events of life consistently emerge at its center, coalescing into the focal point of a silent interior that is otherwise emptied of any distraction, only for this movement to disperse and return, thus rendering the room itself a quiet axis around which life, in all of its stages—its challenges and its celebrations alike—continuously circles and returns.

Dahoul deliberately challenges this condition by compressing this once open room into an enclosed, box-like chamber, where any sense of openness that was once present within it is now entirely withdrawn, thereby confronting its figures with the immediacy of its condition—a space that is defined by absolute boundaries, within which any illusion of freedom is entirely eliminated. And what was once a room that contained several figures moving freely within it is now compressed into a confined, box-like interior, forming an enclosure where a now singular figure—folded inward upon itself—is physically confined to a space that seems both protective and oppressive.

Within this condition, the figure’s interiority remains in suspension, still unresolved, as it begins to settle into a condition that is no longer distinct from what it is. What remains is not a self in the process of becoming, but one that is neither able to project itself outwards nor resolve itself inwards, leaving it in an indefinite state of suspension, entirely contained within its own persistence.

– William Kaprielian, 2026