No night is long enough for us to dream twice (a title borrowed from a line by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish) brings together photography and video by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mohamad Abdouni, Hicham Benohoud, Myriam Boulos, Mohamed Bourouissa, Sabiha Çimen, Hannah Darabi and Abdulhamid Kircher. While these artists work across South West Asia, North Africa and their diasporas, what they share is less a common geography than a relation to pressure. Their images emerge from physical and emotional sites where social forces build, break, then build again.

This relation to pressure also mirrors the contemporary conditions of photography, a medium marked by its own thresholds and limitations. These images are not only records of what Roland Barthes called ‘that-has-been’, they bang against, and burst through, the limits of the world. Through aesthetic strategies of intensification, they generate states of affective overstimulation and saturated excess, where intimacy, pleasure, conflict and longing collide without resolution. If ‘to dream’ names a form of individual and collective imagination, the exhibition suggests that the political role of the image, its capacity to shape how reality appears, is ongoing and unresolved. Perhaps reality itself must first be laid to rest before another dream can take shape.

No night is long enough for us to dream twice is presented by AGWA’s Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art and curated by Dalia Al-Dujaili, Independent Curator, Paris and Rachel Cieśla, Lead Creative, Simon Lee Foundation, AGWA.