Mahmoud El Safadi: Personal Sea

Exhibiting for the first time in Dubai, Lebanese artist Mahmoud El Safadi is showing a collection of miniature paintings on playing cards, a series of works that reflect on the Mediterranean as a site of memory, inheritance, and continuity – “a littoral space that is at once connective and exclusionary, communal and privatised, fluid and heavily policed”. Referencing the card game ‘quatorze’, Safadi layers imagery across the cards to create “a visual palimpsest where personal and inherited memory converge with broader histories of struggle, surveillance, and belonging”.

The backstory lies in the fact that the artist shares the same name as his grandfather, who served with the British between 1939 and 1946. His grandfather’s silence about those years, a time of war, empire, and displacement, becomes an absence that El Safadi approaches through archival research, fragmentary narratives, and speculative painting.

To 2 November.

Above: Mahmoud El Safadi, Personal sea (2025)