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Firetti Contemporary is pleased to present What Remains, a solo presentation of recent works by Syrian artist Ahmad Tallaa at MENART Fair Paris.
In response to the fair’s theme, Where is home?, What Remains considers home as something that can be carried. It can remain in the body, in memory, in material, and in the traces of places that continue to shape us long after we have left them.
Tallaa’s practice is concerned with these traces. Working across painting, sculpture, artist books, and works on paper, he returns repeatedly to the human face, not as a portrait of a particular individual, but as a witness to lived experience. Faces emerge and dissolve across his works. Features are built, erased, layered, and recovered, holding evidence of what has passed through them without becoming fixed by it.
Material is central to this process. Tallaa builds his surfaces using sand, chalk powder, pigments, glue, and acrylic, creating works that are dense and almost sculptural. The sand is collected in the UAE, where Tallaa now lives and works. Its presence brings the physical material of his current environment into works shaped by memory and experience, allowing different places and moments in his life to exist within the same surface.
Born in Damascus and now based in the UAE, Tallaa understands place not as something entirely left behind or arrived at. Past and present overlap. The places we have lived continue through what we remember, what we carry, and the ways those experiences alter us.
Across What Remains, faces surface as though excavated from the material, sculptural forms bear fissures and signs of erosion, and artist books gather marks, gestures, and fragments into intimate records. Nothing is entirely fixed or resolved. Forms appear, disappear, and return changed.
Within this constant movement between presence and absence, What Remains asks where home resides when place itself is no longer permanent. Tallaa’s works suggest that home may exist not only in geography, but in what remains with us: in the body, in material, and in the traces of places we continue to carry.
