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 (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, Myriam Boulos, Hicham Benohoud, 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. Photography has often understood meaning as something that already exists in the world, awaiting capture. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s formulation of the ‘decisive moment’ gives this impulse its enduring form: the singular, privileged instant in which everything is revealed.

The images in this show extend this idea of the decisive moment by laying claim to a moment that cannot be sustained––a flicker of envy, a collision of bodies, a failure of a father, an absurd gesture, the joy of a child––but in capture it is released, and the pressure of the day made temporarily tolerable, before collapsing back into the choppy flow of ongoing life.

Against theoretical frameworks that read photography through loss, trauma or melancholy, these works can be seen as energetically generative rather than elegiac. These images are not only records of what Roland Barthes called the ‘that-has-been’, they bang against, and burst through, the limits of the world.

Like dreams these works do not resolve. Through aesthetic strategies of intensification, they generate states of affective overstimulation in which desire, terror, pleasure and ecstasy accumulate, proliferate and exceed the social conditions that attempt to contain them. In this sense, the exhibition shifts from a modernist faith in the image as revelation toward an understanding of photography as provisional: a temporary symbolic gesture whose meaning emerges through the conditions of its appearance.

Collectively, these practices disrupt the expectation that photography must explain everything or anything. Through staging, intimate observation, appropriation and montage, these works unsettle familiar narratives between victim and militant, tradition and modernity, visibility and erasure. Like dreams, they open onto a world of greater immediacy: one of bodily sensation, fractured states, and energetic abundance, all intermingling.

If ‘to dream’ names a form of individual and collective imagination, No night is long enough for us to dream twice suggests that the political role of the image in its capacity to shape how reality appears is in a stage of ongoing negotiation and always unresolved. What can be seen in these works is not a more truthful representation of South West Asia and North Africa, but a shift in the conditions through which these places, histories and identities become legible. In doing so, the exhibition explores visual grammars that disrupt inherited modes of seeing and expand the potentials of contemporary photography.

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 and Rachel Cieśla, Lead Creative, Simon Lee Foundation, AGWA.

Artist conversation
2.00 PM, Saturday 3 October | FREE
Join artist Abdulhamid Kircher for a conversation with co-curators Dalia Al-Dujaili and Rachel Cieśla to discuss the newest iteration of his ongoing project, Rotting from Within. The conversation will explore Kircher’s working process, the experience of familial estrangement and the emotional weight of relationships that remain unresolved.

Photobooks from the South West Asian and North African (SWANA) region
More than 30 photobooks from the SWANA region are presented in this exhibition. Together they reflect the rich diversity of image-making, design and publishing from countries including Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Kurdistan, Morocco, Palestine, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Tunisia and Türkiye. Artists include Farah Al Qasmi, Hoda Afshar, Mahmoud Khattab, Oumayma Ben Tanfous, Sakir Khader, Fethi Sahraoui, Rawsht Twana, Charbel Alkhoury, Taysir Batniji, Laura El-Tantawy, Nadhim Ramzi, Eugenie Dolberg, Yumna Al-Arashi, Tanya Traboulsi and Lara Chahine.