Across a Velvet Horizon, is a collaborative presentation of Egyptian artists Nada Baraka and Esraa Elfeky. The exhibition orbits a sense of incompleteness, an expanse of the unknown that speaks to the human impulse to make sense of the past - to impose coherence on chaos, and create stories that mend the gaps in what we know. Here, history is unfixed and left open to question. Viewers are invited to sit with uncertainty, to embrace the search even when the full picture remains tantalisingly out of reach.
Observing the work feels like entering an unfamiliar archive, a space where fragments of history hover, waiting to be pieced together. Observers become both archaeologists and storytellers, reconstructing meaning from what remains. The works hint at an unspoken event - a rupture - leaving the audience to work backwards, deciphering the traces left behind and the gaps they refuse to fill.
An atmosphere of mystery and discovery permeates the curation. Baraka’s evocative paintings and Elfeky’s tactile sculptures offer-up a dreamlike haze, where memory feels fragile and incomplete. They offer a visual narrative that blurs personal, cultural, and environmental histories, occupying a space between the real and the imagined. Rather than simply reflecting history the works on view confront its silences. Baraka’s canvases wrestle with memory as mutable, shifting under the weight of interpretation, while Elfeky’s sculptures suggest the land itself as a vessel of stories - holding onto lives long past, yet yielding only fragments.
Baraka’s paintings act as portals into fractured, surreal landscapes. Inspired by her late grandfather Ahmed Ali Kamal’s archive, her acrylic and oil canvases incorporate elements like postcards heavy with hidden emotions, their texts faintly discernible beneath vivid layers of paint. Works such as The Edge of Saudade and The Colour of Why exude an aching sense of longing, as though the past is slipping through one’s fingers. Baraka describes her process as engaging with the ‘antilogic’ of dreams, where memories are reimagined into surreal narratives. A wooden structure within the gallery serves as both sculpture and metaphor - a map inviting viewers to navigate these fragmented stories and construct connections of their own.
Elfeky’s sculptures, in dialogue, evoke artefacts from a lost world. Inspired by a desert plot in Cairo that was once submerged beneath the sea, her soft, fabric-covered forms resemble fossils or the remnants of ancient organisms. Her largest work, The Blue Wadi Resurrection, sprawls across the gallery floor like a relic unearthed from deep time, in contrast with works in smaller scale. Threads, leather, and fabric intertwine to create forms poised between decay and renewal, extinction and adaptation. Suspended sculptures hover in liminal spaces, as though caught between worlds, waiting to be deciphered.
