What remains are quieter, deeper truths—memory, longing, loss, and the enduring human instinct to belong. These are not maps meant to orient us geographically, but emotionally.
In Khozema Al-Aaed’s practice, the earth becomes a witness.
His abstracted cartographies from the ongoing Cities series are stripped of names, borders, and fixed routes. What remains are quieter, deeper truths—memory, longing, loss, and the enduring human instinct to belong. These are not maps meant to orient us geographically, but emotionally.
The works feel like fragments of cities once inhabited, imagined, or abandoned. Their lines echo footsteps and roads that may no longer exist, yet continue to shape who we are. Al-Aaed reminds us that land is never neutral: it absorbs our movements, our wounds, our hopes, becoming a living archive of human presence.
Here, maps transform into confessions. Each intersection suggests a choice once made or avoided; each void allows a memory to resurface. The materials—iron, stone, clay, wood, and pigment—carry landscapes forged through both tenderness and turmoil, permanence and erosion.
We Walk on Stories invites us not to decode, but to feel. To stand before these works and recognize the paths we have lost, the ones we continue to seek, and those still unfolding ahead.
Through these reimagined cartographies, Al-Aaed reminds us that we are all walking stories—crossing, returning, and wandering—forever shaped by the land, and endlessly mapping our way back to it.
