At Darat al Funun in Amman, a powerful group exhibition titled In That Same Hour invites visitors into a space where art becomes witness, memory, and moral presence. Bringing together artists from across the Arab world and beyond, the exhibition confronts the realities of grief, violence, and endurance, with a particular focus on Gaza — not as a distant headline, but as a lived and ongoing human catastrophe.
Rather than offering a single narrative, the exhibition unfolds as a constellation of voices. Each artwork stands on its own, yet together they form a layered emotional and political landscape — one that moves between personal loss and collective trauma, between silence and refusal, between documentation and resistance.
The exhibition’s guiding idea is the notion of “the hour” — a moment in which everything changes. In one hour, lives are disrupted, erased, mourned, and remembered. In one hour, the world reveals itself — both in its brutality and in its capacity for solidarity. This framing becomes the emotional backbone of the exhibition, holding together works that differ greatly in form but not in urgency.
Visitors encounter installations, videos, sound works, prints, and sculptural pieces that ask difficult questions: What does it mean to look at suffering from afar? What does responsibility mean in a world saturated with images of violence? Can attention itself be an ethical act?
Some works confront violence directly, exposing systems of control, surveillance, and bureaucratic oppression. Others focus on memory, ritual, and the quiet persistence of everyday life under impossible conditions. There is no catharsis here, no neat resolution — only accumulation. Grief upon grief. Image upon image. Hour upon hour.
What emerges is not despair alone, but insistence. A refusal to allow erasure to pass unnoticed. A refusal to allow silence to replace accountability. In this sense, In That Same Hour is not simply an exhibition — it is a space of collective witnessing, where art does not offer comfort, but offers clarity.
The exhibition runs until the end of May, leaving behind not a sense of closure, but a lingering responsibility: to remember, to question, and to continue looking, even when looking is hard.
