LUX in Dhalaam.لوكس في الظلام

LUX in Dhalaam. لوكس في الظلام was an exhibition curated by Laura Xenopol where five artists turned a narrow gallery into a portal between light and darkness. They used objects as a playful way to explore how humans sense, translate, and understand things that could not be fully explained in words. Dhalaam, derived from the Arabic ظلام meaning shadow or darkness, was imagined as a parallel realm where light miscommunicated: it bent, listened, got the message wrong, then tried again. Each work was an artifact pulled playfully and imperfectly through that corridor. Paintings, glass walls, video projections, post-it notes, digitally-manipulated images, and performance functioned as the artists' field research tools for Dhalaam. The following artists undertook the incursion into the parallel realm of Dhalaam: Laura Xenopol (b. 1999, Romania), Khalid Al Amimi (b. 1996, UAE), Metha Naser (b. 1998, UAE), Sara Almaazmi (b. 1999, UAE), and Yoonsik Chico Park (b. 1998, South Korea). The resulting site-specific activation hearkened back to forms of knowledge that predate language and formal education, like the instinctual acts of marking cave walls or the rhythms of stories passed down around campfires. These early acts of storytelling and symbolic transcription were once warnings, guides, and repositories of wisdom, ensuring the continuity of human consciousness. Rather than presenting art as fixed objects, this exhibition framed it as a method of knowing: an intuitive, rigorous practice of mistranslation, where error was fruitful. Visitors traversed this corridor. Ultimately, the exhibition proposed art-making as communal intelligence and a corridor where the seen and unseen briefly touched.