“Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.”
John Berger, Why Look at Animals?, 1977
With Feathers in the Reeds, Milk in the Mud, Hunna Art inaugurates its temporary space in Alserkal Avenue with the first solo exhibition of Emirati multidisciplinary artist Wafa Al Falahi. The exhibition gathers paintings and ceramic sculptures into an imaginary bestiary: a world of hybrid creatures who dance, wait, hide and converse across dreamlike landscapes. Pieced together from what has stayed with the artist after moving through a place, recomposed through memory, childhood and fantasy, they are figments of a surreal world that runs parallel to our own.
Al Falahi’s creatures take up the role Berger gives animals. They arrive as messengers whose message is never spelled out: each image carries a feeling, a memory or a premonition. Through processes reminiscent of the Rorschach test, they emerge from papier mâché, pastel and pigment, raised in thick relief on the canvas. Trained in spatial design, the artist conceives each work as an environment, and the exhibition unfolds as a single terrain in which her creatures pass from painting to sculpture, from the wall into the space of the gallery.
A Lineage of Fables
Using animals to speak of ourselves is among the oldest gestures of storytelling. In the eighth century, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ rendered the Middle Persian version of the Indian Panchatantra into Arabic as Kalīla wa-Dimna, in which jackals, lions, crows and tortoises debate loyalty, cunning and power. A century later, al-Jāḥiẓ compiled his Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, the Book of Animals, where observation of living creatures sits beside proverb, poetry and wonder. In seventeenth-century France, Jean de La Fontaine turned the fable towards his own society. “Je me sers d’animaux pour instruire les hommes” (I use animals to instruct men), he wrote in the dedication of his first collection of Fables (1668), and behind his lions, foxes and wolves stood the court of Louis XIV, its flatterers and its uneven justice. In a phrase that could describe this whole tradition, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that natural species are chosen “not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think’.”
Alongside the fable runs a second lineage: that of creatures existing only in the imagination. In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges gathered the chimera, the griffin and many other composites assembled from the parts of different animals. Closer to us, Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), the British-born painter and writer who made Mexico her home, built a universe in which stories and paintings form a single world, populated by talking animals, hybrid creatures and unexpected metamorphoses, where horses and hyenas become extensions of the self and some beings are half plant, half mineral. Al Falahi has long been a reader of Carrington, and the recent retrospective devoted to her at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris confirms a quiet affinity between the two artists: a way of imagining in which painted and written worlds can be vividly lived, as well as looked at.
Al Falahi’s hybrids belong to this family of beings, made of fragments and memories, yet her fables carry no fixed morals. Where a classical fable would punish greed, Venus lets it linger. An inverted cow reclines across an orchard in the pose of the reclining Venus painted by Giorgione and Titian, her familiar markings reversed. Beside her rests a single apple, the remnant of an earlier offering. Gift, temptation or tribute, the fruit suggests an exchange already made, and yet she remains expectant: suspended between grace and concupiscence , it becomes a cipher for an appetite that grows through being fed.
Fruit returns across the smaller works as a quieter talisman. In Divine Offering, a bird with angel-like wings is suspended mid-flight, holding a fruit it has discovered close to its body, in a place that may lie somewhere between life and death. In Fortuity, a dark hand reaches towards a ripe fruit floating against a green ground. As in the oldest fables, the animal becomes a vessel for human emotions and desires, yet here beauty sits alongside violence, innocence alongside desire, and the works leave these tensions unresolved. Their meaning stays open, as it does in a dream.
Encounters
Across the paintings, meaning arises from encounters: between two bodies, between a creature and its landscape, between the work and the one who looks at it. In Symbiosis, two birds meet for a fleeting moment in a dance on unstable rocks, and water rises from the stone as though their encounter had summoned it. In Entwined, a bird dances alone in a field while a plant curls around its leg, following its movement or perhaps guiding it. In In Full Bloom, a ballerina and a flowering stem perform together until it becomes impossible to say which one leads. Gesture becomes ritual, and the landscape, so often a backdrop, becomes a partner and a witness: movement produces growth, and growth produces movement.
The most decisive encounter is the exchange of looks. Berger’s essay turns on this moment: the animal, he writes, scrutinises us “across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension.” Twenty years later, Jacques Derrida opened The Animal That Therefore I Am with a similar scene, standing before the gaze of his cat: “The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.” Philosophy, Derrida suggests, has long spoken about animals without considering that they might look back; to feel oneself seen by one, exposed and without words, is where another kind of thinking can begin. The Third Gaze stages this awakening. Two mirrored birds share a single body perched on a rock, and as they journey together, a pair of eyes opens within their joined form, revealing a face that had always been there, unseen. The gift of sight is also a loss: to see more clearly is to surrender the comfort of not knowing. Born of the mirroring at the heart of Al Falahi’s process, the image turns the question back on the viewer. Who, in this exhibition, is looking at whom?
Some encounters offer refuge. In Hidden spring, a fountain stands at the centre of an imagined landscape. Its creatures appear to have frozen in place, their bodies merging with the stone of the basin as if they had willingly taken this form to shelter the fish in its waters; living beings, sculpture and environment become difficult to tell apart. In A Place Close to Home, a bird lies quietly on the earth before a house-like structure, content in its stillness. The house offers shelter, yet the bird has chosen the ground. Belonging, the work suggests, is found less in the places built for us than in the places where we choose to rest.
Between Breath and Clay
In some paintings, the creature arrives fully formed. It is outlined, raised in relief, caught in a story. In others, it is still arriving, or already leaving. In The First of Spring, bodies run downward in washes and drips, as if the paint were water returning to the ground. The birds of Courtship Dance are made of a few white strokes, almost transparent, closer to breath than to flesh. In Becoming, a face appears in a flame of petals only because two pale eyes have been placed there. Beneath the earth of The First Murmur, a curled, horned body sleeps while a red flower draws on it through its roots, and in Rippling Waters, two creatures lean over a pool whose water takes on their colours.
In these works, the boundary between figure and ground loosens. The creatures dissolve into earth, water or light, and the canvas, often stained and left visible, becomes the place where they appear. The relief and papier mâché remain, gathered in the foliage and in the buried body, but the beings themselves are lighter, more fugitive. Movement is less a gesture made by a body than a state of being: melting, rising, germinating, reflecting. Here the title of the exhibition becomes literal. Like feathers in the reeds, the figures are glimpsed more than seen; like milk in the mud, they sink into the ground that holds them.
Some bodies multiply. In Topsy-turvy, the mirror symmetry of the paintings passes into three dimensions and the world turns upside down: what appears on the canvas as a reflection becomes a single body with two faces, each turned towards a different side of the room. In Carcass, the mirror breaks: heads and limbs grow unevenly from a single body, as though the reflection had multiplied beyond its frame. Alongside them, other creatures stand alone, like talismans, each carrying the quality its title names: the astonished Boggle, the tangled Muddle, the contrary Quibble, the fleeting Wisp, the stillness of In Repose, the yielding protection of Soft Armour and the promise held within Flowering Omen.
Clay has carried animal forms for millennia. What sets Al Falahi’s sculptures apart is their continuity with the paintings. The creatures seem to have stepped out of their landscapes, carrying with them the textures of the canvas. The artist describes this passage as an intersection, the point where the imaginary begins to become something we can see and feel within our physical world. Walking around the sculptures, the viewer meets the creatures on common ground, at their own scale. Between the most fugitive beings on canvas and the weight of clay, the exhibition follows its creatures through every state, from apparition to body to earth.
A Parallel Companionship
Berger names the bond that animals once offered: “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.”
Feathers in the Reeds, Milk in the Mud asks what happens when the human is no longer at the centre of the narrative. The question runs through much contemporary art. Introducing The Milk of Dreams, the 2022 Venice Biennale named after a book by Leonora Carrington, curator Cecilia Alemani observed that many artists “envision the end of anthropocentrism” and imagine “worlds inhabited by porous, hybrid, manifold beings.” Al Falahi’s imagined ecosystems belong to such worlds, granting animals, plants and landscapes their own interiority and agency. Her creatures move between roles as the story turns, witness and predator, protector and prey, human and animal, until the line between them grows ever thinner.
In opening our new space in Alserkal Avenue with her work, we offer this bestiary as a place of encounter, where the look Berger feared we had lost is returned to us once more.
By Océane Sailly
References
Cecilia Alemani, Statement, The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2022.
John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (1977), in About Looking, Writers and Readers / Pantheon, 1980.
Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, E. P. Dutton, 1969 (first published as Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957).
Leonora Carrington, retrospective, Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, 18 February to 19 July 2026.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, Fordham University Press, 2008.
Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Kalīla wa-Dimna, Arabic, 8th century.
al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (The Book of Animals), Arabic, 9th century.
Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers, Paris, 1668 to 1694.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham, Beacon Press, 1963 (first published 1962), p. 89.
