Firetti Contemporary

On view at Maraya Art Centre as part of “Who I Become” curated by

Salmah Almansoori
“I Was a Forgotten Moment”, 2024–2026
Acrylic on canvas
Variable dimensions

In this series, Salmah Almansoori brings overlooked objects back into focus, transforming fragments of everyday life into layered visual narratives. Through walking, observing, and collecting, she captures traces of spaces once inhabited, where small elements quietly hold memory.

Through painting, these forgotten moments are reawakened. Color becomes a tool for re-seeing, preserving what might otherwise disappear into the background.

Artwork highlight | “Tracing What Remains, 2025” On view at Maraya Art Centre as part of solo exhibition “Who I Become”

“Tracing What Remains, 2025”
Watercolor on handmade palm paper
120 × 230 cm

In this series, Salmah Almansoori explores the layered cultural and ecological memory of Ghayathi. Handmade from locally sourced alfalfa and pond fibers, the paper becomes both material and method, an act of documenting a landscape once shaped by water systems. These fibers, gathered and transformed, function as an archive of place, holding within them traces of a city that has largely remained undocumented.

Through mark-making, Salmah works in close dialogue with the material, allowing the fibers to guide rhythm, texture, and form. Rather than imposing an image, the surface determines the outcome, where layers are built, disrupted, and reformed over time.

What emerges is not a literal depiction, but a sensory translation of place. Each work holds within it histories of survival, transformation, and ecological presence, becoming a living document rooted in tradition, shaped by modernity, and resisting cultural erasure through the act of making.

Firetti Contemporary is pleased to take part in Déjà Vu, a multi-gallery exhibition conceptualised by Alserkal, opening this Saturday at Concrete, Alserkal Avenue.

The show brings together over 50 artists exploring repetition, dissonance, and the uncanny sensation of having seen something before.

We present portraits by Ahmad Tallaa and the Road Series by Mai Al Remeithi. Tallaa’s figures are built through layers of scraping, erasure, and reworking. His faces don’t settle. They shift. Al Remeithi traces road fragments from Abu Dhabi and Dubai through thread work and layering, mapping the invisible routes shaped by memory and time.

25 April to 8 May 2026
Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai