Art Dubai: Wafa Al Falahi solo presentation
For Bawwaba 2026, Hunna Art presents a solo presentation by Emirati multidisciplinary artist Wafa Al Falahi, whose practice unfolds at the intersection of painting, sculpture, and drawing. Conceived as an immersive environment, the booth functions as a spatial journal ; a unified cosmology mapping cycles of birth, life, death, and afterlife through hallucinatory landscapes and hybrid beings suspended in a liminal terrain of emergence and erosion.
To encounter Al Falahi's work is to be held at a threshold where the somatic and the oneiric refuse separation, and where the painted surface becomes a site of perpetual negotiation between presence and disappearance. Working with papier-mâché, charcoal, pigment, pastel, and clay, she operates through an additive and reductive logic — building, breaching, and reforming — that renders material itself a form of memory: thickening, cracking, and softening over time. Her background in spatial design informs this approach fundamentally; each work functions as an environment to be entered, each sculpture assumes a bodily presence that extends the painted dreamscape into three dimensions.
The works presented constitute a sustained meditation on becoming, on the precarious instants before form settles, before identity solidifies, before the body fully comprehends its own environment. In the Deleuzian sense, becoming is never arrival: it is the condition of being always in process, always between states, never reducible to a fixed identity. This is the terrain Al Falahi inhabits and constructs. In Lucid, figures surface through one another in a continuous cycle of emergence and erosion, resisting stable selfhood in favour of a state of flux in which ground and figure are rendered inseparable. In Burial, a bird withdraws into the earth not in defeat but in a gesture of quiet negotiation with mortality, the ground becoming a site of safety rather than finality.
Al Falahi's fauna — birds, crocodiles, hybrid bull-birds — are not merely symbolic conventions but philosophical propositions. The Bull Bird series renders fragility structurally indispensable: the bird constitutes the bull's horn, making tenderness load-bearing within force. Desire, An Act of Destruction stages the crocodilian kiss as a study in the inextricability of intimacy and annihilation, a tension that runs through the entirety of the practice, where care and destruction are never fully disentangled.
The smaller works deepen this choreography of sensation. Entanglement locates self-awareness at its most nascent, before the body has learned to distinguish itself from its surroundings. The Thinning Veil renders death as passage rather than terminus, the ascending form caught in luminous suspension between two states of being. Solicitude bends space around its subject — the room warps, perception shifts, and the still figure holds within its stillness the full weight of what is yet to arrive.
Al Falahi works with empathy as a formal strategy, building worlds in which vulnerability is not weakness but the very condition of form. The presentation invites viewers to dwell within a dreamlike terrain where instinct guides perception, and where life and death unfold not as opposites but as continuous, intertwined states of becoming.
