Nada Elkalaawy: The Butterfly’s Burden

Borrowed from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the title of this exhibition by by London-based artist Nada Elkalaawy “speaks to the tension between sensitivity, beauty, and emotional weight”, as the gallery has it. “Across a body of paintings developed through layered processes of accumulation and erasure, Elkalaawy explores memory, loss, regeneration, and the passage of time; ephemeral forms including flowers, butterflies, domestic vessels, family photographs, and ghostly figures hold traces of shared human experience, drifting between past and present, presence and absence.”

Elkalaawy’s practice is based in the relationship between memory, representation, and materiality. Drawing from a personal archive of photographs accumulated over many years, she constructs compositions “that blur the boundaries between the lived, the remembered, and the imagined … Through processes of collage, reworking, and painterly methods, these fragments are displaced from their original contexts and absorbed into new configurations”.

Above: Nada Elkalaawy, A Soft Burning (2026)

WEB LINK ↗