"I’m Never Coming Back feels like something you say when a part of you has shifted for good. It’s not dramatic—it’s quiet, certain. It marks a turning point, even if you’re still figuring out what exactly changed."
Firetti Contemporary and Hunna Art Gallery are pleased to present I’m Never Coming Back, a solo exhibition by Aidha Badr.
Motherhood marks a quiet and profound transformation. It arrives without ceremony, altering the texture of days and the weight of thoughts until even the smallest parts of oneself begin to feel unfamiliar. Not replaced, but carefully rearranged with care. It is a transformation that is both beautiful and unsettling—filled with stillness, waiting, and a quiet longing for the parts of oneself left behind.
In I’m Never Coming Back, she paints from the liminal space of transformation, where identity is shifting but not yet defined, between daughter and mother, between who she was and who she is becoming. The works unfold like diary entries: fragile, raw, and emotionally exposed. They capture the disorientation of a silent unraveling, where identity hovers between what has passed and what is still taking form.
Badr’s earlier practice centered on girlhood and the emotional weight of maternal relationships. Her figures were once observed at a distance, shaped by recollection and guided by the gaze of a daughter seeking to understand the women before her. Now, painting as a mother herself, the lens shifts inward. The canvases become more intimate, the figures embodied, and the language more urgent. Rather than recalling the past, these paintings live in the immediacy of the present, where identity is unsettled and in motion.
This series also introduces a new motif: the horse. For Badr, it embodies what it means to accept change without resistance—to move forward quietly, with grace. No longer a creature of flight or escape, the horse reflects presence and stillness. At times fully formed, at others fragile like a toy, it becomes a vessel for suspension, existing between impulse and restraint.
Her process is deliberate: each composition is carefully drafted in advance, yet she allows the works to retain a sense of breath and openness. For Badr, a painting is complete not when an emotion resolves, but when the canvas itself no longer asks for more.
Handwritten fragments punctuate the works—“Stay with me a little longer,” “I’m not the same and I’m never coming back.” These words are not declarations but echoes, remnants of an inner dialogue that resists closure.
The self-portraits woven into the exhibition reinforce this tension. Cropped tightly and rendered with a sense of compression, they withhold intimacy rather than invite it, situating the viewer in the uneasy space between closeness and distance, longing and presence.
At its core, I’m Never Coming Back is a meditation on the female psyche and the layered voices of womanhood. The daughter remains curious, sensitive, always looking back. The mother is quieter, grounded, protective. These voices are not separate but folded into one another, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in harmony. Together they chart the fragile, unresolvable process of becoming.
For Badr, this exhibition is also a gesture toward the future. If her daughter were to encounter the work years from now, she hopes it would reveal both the depth of her love and the transformation that motherhood brought: a shift that forever changed the way she sees herself and the world around her.
