Afterglow: From The Residue of a Departed Sun: No.9 Frieze Cork Street, London, UK
For No.9 Frieze Cork Street, London, October 2026, Tabari presents Afterglow: From the Residue of a Departed Sun, a group exhibition of new works by four artists: Maitha Abdalla (b. 1989, Khorfakkan, UAE), Omar Kholeif (b. Cairo, Egypt; British-Egyptian-Sudanese), Mohamed Monaiseer (b. 1989, Cairo, Egypt) and Randa Maddah (b. 1983, occupied Golan Heights), working across painting, spoken word and poetry, installation, mixed media and sculpture.
Afterglow is the light that keeps vigil after its source has set below the horizon. Taken as the theme of this group presentation, Afterglow invites a double reading: it is the residue of a departed sun, but also the light a body radiates in the act of living. Maitha Abdalla, Omar Kholeif, Mohamed Monaiseer and Randa Maddah each render the border between life and death porous, drawing on their own inner cosmologies: Emirati folk narratives, the African trickster myth, Islamic metaphysics, and the doctrine of the soul that animates culture in the Golan Heights. Celestial forms effloresce across the gallery walls, transmitting a visual vocabulary that interrogates the scope of the unconscious, the uncanny, and the threshold beyond the tangible realm and the immaterial dimensions of the imagination.
Artists and Artworks
Maitha Abdalla paints the unseen world of Gulf folklore absorbed during her youth. Her canvases borrow theatrical codes and cast anthropomorphic creatures drawn from tales her grandmother told: the rooster that sees angels, the donkey that senses devils, the pig that embodies sin. These animals function as facets of a single self, externalising an inner life under pressure. When the lived world resists explanation, one reaches for the spiritual to make sense of it, and Abdalla’s hybrid beings are where fear, desire and guilt acquire a face. She joins a lineage that gives animal form to inner life: Goya’s monsters of the irrational, Frida Kahlo’s wounded stag, Leonora Carrington’s alchemical familiars, drawing her own menagerie from regional oral narratives. She paints rapidly, in oil, acrylic and pastel, her figures losing their edges at the moment the spirit world touches the physical one. Her landscapes, exhibited here, are devoid of inhabitants; instead, they foreground weather and atmosphere. She captures the liminal moment of dusk, when the sun has departed, yet the sky still carries its charge, the afterglow absorbed into earth.
For two decades, Omar Kholeif has worked through the vessel of the trickster, the shape-shifting representative of numerous cosmologies, including that of African myth. The trickster, in this domain, is one who treats every threshold as a portal-door. Known to many as an award-winning author, curator and museum director, Kholeif crosses a threshold of their own here: marking the first occasion in which they exhibit their visual art exclusively in the UK outside of a curatorial framework of their own making. Their visual practice extends what they term ‘dreamwork’: a form of social imagination devoted to safeguarding diasporic aesthetic cultures in the age of light, an era, they argue, in which the sun’s oldest metaphors travel as pulses along cables laid across the seabed. Working through avatars and heteronyms, Kholeif conjures paintings that summon iconographies spanning William Blake’s Book of Urizen, memories of Igbo shrines, and the Coptic churches of Egypt, reassembled as sites of lurid recovery, where sensuous, transmogrifying body and wave forms in thick oils on linen, in luminous pigments of red, ochre and blue, come to life. The paintings on view explore the liminal spaces: the afterlives, the shadows of family lost. Home reclaimed and dispossessed, only to start again. If the trickster’s gift is to pass between realms and return altered, then the afterglow is their natural hour: the interval in which what has departed continues to shine.
Mohamed Monaiseer’s installation extends earlier work rooted in the notion of barzakh: in Islamic cosmology, the realm between death and resurrection, and the partition dividing the material and spiritual worlds. He works through obsessive, repetitive mark-making on shroud-like lengths of raw fabric, drawing on the appliqué of Egyptian khayamiya and the geometries of Islamicate pattern. Repeated by hand, a single word or figure accumulates like an incantation, until the surface functions like a membrane and the immaterial presses through. The unravelling weave summons the limen as a material state; through frayed edges and deliberate imperfections, the crossing is rendered visible.
Randa Maddah works from the varied beliefs and traditions of the occupied Golan, which suggest that the soul does not end at death; it transmigrates into a new body. Her practice is preoccupied with reincarnation, ecstasy and liberation. Born on the ceasefire line at Majdal Shams, she paints luxuriant gardens where leaf-coated figures move between the human and the vegetal, and the boundary between spirit, body and the ground that will receive them gives way. The garden is an old vehicle for the cycle of life and death: Bosch and Bruegel, to whom she looks, used it to stage creation, earthly life and judgment in a single frame. Maddah inherits this tradition and turns it; her garden is a site of return, where decay feeds growth and death ushers in another life. For Afterglow, she produces a book and a company of clay figures: earth modelled and fired into bodies that endure and transform. In them, the garden’s cycle takes on material form; ground into body, body into ground.
The artists assembled in Afterglow turn to the unseen, to radiance that outlasts its source. For all their reckoning with mortality, they extend the possibility that what ends on earth resumes elsewhere. Dusk light settles into soil, the immaterial presses through the barzakh, and the soul receives a new incarnation. Each basks in the afterglow.
