What happens when a place exists more strongly in memory than in reality? This question sits at the heart of In Absence and in Presence: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, presented at Aranya Art Center in Guangzhou, China, and concluding on 6 August 2026.

Bringing together more than 70 works by 28 artists, the exhibition marked the Sharjah Art Foundation’s largest international presentation in Asia to date. Rather than offering a conventional survey of Arab modern and contemporary art, the exhibition explored how artists reconstruct ideas of homeland, history and identity through fragments of memory.

Across the galleries, landscapes, architecture, sound, photography and sculpture became different ways of remembering. Works by Iman Issa questioned how history is documented and how objects can acquire authority simply through the way they are presented. Meanwhile, Etel Adnan’s landscapes transformed mountains and trees into intimate records of places that could become deeply personal, even from a distance.

The idea of an absent homeland became particularly powerful in works connected to memory and displacement. In Akram Zaatari’s The Landing, the remains of abandoned housing in Sharjah become the setting for an experimental soundscape, bringing traces of past lives back into the present. Elsewhere, artists such as Mona Hatoum, Hassan Sharif and Zineb Sedira explored land, borders, migration and the stories that risk disappearing from collective memory.

The exhibition also turned towards the human figure, everyday life and personal narratives. Through paintings, sculptures and photography, the final gallery blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination, while documenting experiences that often exist beyond official versions of history.

At its core, In Absence and in Presence suggests that homeland does not always have to be a physical place. It can exist in a landscape remembered from childhood, a family story, a sound, an object or even an imagined city passed down through generations.

Presented in Guangzhou, the Sharjah Art Foundation collection created a dialogue between the Middle East and China through a universal language: memory. The exhibition may have closed on 6 August 2026, but its central idea remains — when a place disappears from our immediate surroundings, art can become one of the ways we bring it back.