What Remains

In an era defined by violence, displacement and environmental crisis, the question of what survives catastrophe has become increasingly urgent. Through this new body of work, Adel Abidin returns to painting to investigate how trauma inscribes itself upon landscape, memory, and collective consciousness. Throughout these distinct works, the horizon line emerges as a constant yet mutable presence—sometimes a stark divider, elsewhere a blurred boundary—guiding viewers through varied territories of loss and persistence.

While these landscapes and seascapes possess a deliberate universality—they could be anywhere displacement and loss have left their mark—nevertheless, they are also deeply informed by Abidin’s formative years in Iraq. The quality of light, the relationship between water and land, the specific texture of destruction—all carry echoes of Iraqi terrain, though transformed through memory and artistic vision into spaces that speak to global experiences of destruction and loss.

Each painting offers its own meditation on displacement, united by the horizon’s role as both geographical marker and psychological opening. While one canvas might present the horizon as a wound across a fractured landscape, another transforms it into a liminal space where mechanical debris and human figures hover between existence and erasure. These distinct approaches to the horizon create a dialogue between works, speaking to different aspects of dislocation and survival.

The power of these works resonates with poignant meditations on cultural collapse throughout history. Like the preserved ruins of Pompeii, where an entire civilization stands frozen in ash, these paintings capture moments suspended between existence and obliteration. In their stark horizons and fractured landscapes, they echo T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, a modernist vision of a world of broken images and fallen towers, where mountains appear and disappear in the brown fog of a desolate terrain. Abidin’s paintings, like Eliot’s verses, reveal how desert visions and mirages can speak truth about trauma and chaos.

Drawing from his position as a diaspora artist working between cultures, Abidin transforms the condition of dislocation into a universal meditation on survival and renewal. His return to painting amid our current global crises proves particularly resonant—the medium itself becomes a way of preserving and processing collective trauma, much as ruins continue to tell stories of both destruction and persistence.

What Remains ultimately asks us to consider what persists when the familiar falls away. In these painted testimonies, memory becomes a repository of loss but also a source of regeneration. Through these works, we witness how remembrance itself can become an act of resistance, transforming apocalyptic ruins of the past into foundations for imagining new futures.

 Dr. Tamara Chalabi