TRACES OF HOME : By Salmah Almansoori & Marilina Marchica

Traces of Home brings together Emirati artist Salmah Almansoori and Italian artist Marilina Marchica in a dialogue between two landscapes and cultural geographies. Through painting, drawing, installation, and material experimentation, the exhibition explores how place shapes memory, identity, and belonging.

For Almansoori, this relationship begins in Ghayathi, the town in Al Dhafra where she was born and raised. Her multidisciplinary practice engages with changing architecture, abandoned structures, domestic fragments, and remembered landscapes. Through painting, photography, found materials, ceramics, and installation, she creates visual and material records of places in transition, considering how environments become embedded in personal memory.

Marchica approaches landscape through reduction, materiality, and trace. Working with walls, ruins, weathered surfaces, and architectural fragments, she transforms physical remnants through drawing, frottage, painting, and casting. Rather than reconstructing what has disappeared, she focuses on what remains a mark, fracture, imprint, or residue allowing absence and the passage of time to become visible.

Placed together, the artists reveal a shared interest in what survives. While Almansoori looks to the landscapes and architectural histories of the UAE, Marchica draws from those of Italy. Their approaches differ, yet both understand landscape as more than geography: it is a repository of experience, memory, and human presence.

The title Traces of Home leaves the idea of home open. It may be a building, a landscape, a material, or a memory something we inhabit or carry within us. For both artists, home exists not only in a place itself, but in the traces that remain after it has changed.

The exhibition also extends Almansoori’s connection with Italy, following her 2024 presentation Memories Are Home in Ventimiglia. Here, her practice enters a new dialogue with Marchica’s engagement with the landscapes and architectural histories of Sicily, bringing two distinct cultural contexts together through a shared reflection on place, memory, and belonging.