In her deeply personal debut solo exhibition, Emirati artist Moza Al Falasi transforms grief, memory, and emotional fragmentation into a powerful visual experience. Presented at Tashkeel in Dubai, Unfolding is more than an exhibition — it is an intimate reflection on inherited sorrow, loss, and the emotional traces left within domestic spaces.
The exhibition marks the culmination of Al Falasi’s participation in Tashkeel’s Critical Practice Programme, a year-long initiative supporting artists across the UAE through mentorship, studio access, and creative development. Guided by mentors Luisa Menano and Hanaa Bou Hamdan, Al Falasi developed a multidisciplinary body of work that combines sculpture, photography, painting, plaster, fabric, and sound.
At the heart of Unfolding lies the concept of inherited grief — the emotional weight passed silently across generations. For Al Falasi, grief is not simply a personal emotion but a force that shapes identity in visible and invisible ways. The exhibition became even more intimate following the deaths of her mother and later her husband during the development of the project.
Rather than attempting to explain grief, Al Falasi approaches art as a language for expressing emotions that words often fail to capture. The works do not reconstruct the home literally, but instead evoke it through fragments, textures, sounds, and impressions. Walls appear incomplete, spaces feel suspended, and sounds fade in and out like distant memories.
Photography plays a central role throughout the exhibition, though not as documentation. Instead, the images focus on the emotional atmosphere attached to spaces and objects, transforming ordinary details into carriers of memory and absence.
One of the exhibition’s most striking works is a two-meter-high 3D-printed sculpture derived from an earlier plaster cast. Originally created from the imprint of a door motif, the piece became unintentionally distorted during the molding process as the plaster escaped its boundaries. Rather than discarding the imperfect form, Al Falasi enlarged it through 3D printing, allowing the distortion itself to become symbolic of grief and the ways emotional trauma reshapes inner landscapes.
The sculpture also carries a deeply personal dimension. After losing her husband midway through the Tashkeel programme, the artist returned during its final stages and revisited earlier works developed throughout the year, giving them new emotional significance.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, recurring images of women and olive trees appear as symbols of resilience, continuity, and survival. Colour and material shift throughout the space, reflecting the artist’s belief that grief cannot be reduced to a single visual language. Sometimes grief takes the form of darkness, while at other times it emerges through texture, silence, or physical distortion.
The exhibition extends beyond the gallery itself through a collaboration with Emirati restaurant Gerbou, located beside the exhibition space. Inspired by Al Falasi’s work, the restaurant created a dessert balancing sweetness and saltiness — flavours that the artist describes as symbolic of tenderness, memory, tears, and emotional residue.
Ultimately, Unfolding becomes a meditation on survival as much as loss. Through fragmented spaces, altered forms, and quiet visual intensity, Moza Al Falasi invites viewers into an emotional landscape where grief is neither hidden nor resolved, but transformed into a space for reflection, expression, and human connection.
The exhibition runs until June 26 at Tashkeel’s Nad Al Sheba 1 Gallery in Dubai.
