Exhibition Research Lab (LJMU)
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The Refuge
Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 2026 – Photography exhibition
(In collaboration with the Exhibition Research Lab Gallery at John Moores University)
Through the eclectic perspectives of contemporary photography artists, the group exhibition The Refuge reflects on the notion of ‘home’ in the context of today’s Arabness. Each work explores nuanced stories of displacement and longing, whiler evealing home as a paradox in transition – whether rooted in place and territory, carried through family and sociocultural heritage, or shaped by memory, movement, and lived geographies.
ARTISTS: Abdulrahman Hassona, Farah Maktari, Houari Bouchenak, Lydia Saidi, Maya-Ines Touam, Shareef Sarhan
July 16th – July 24th
Mondays & Wednesdays 11am – 5pm
Tuesdays & Thursdays 12pm – 5pm
Fridays & Saturdays – 11am – 5pm
VENUE: The Exhibition Research Lab Gallery, John Moores University
LAUNCH
Thursday 16th July
Start – 6.00pm
Finish – 8.00pm – CLICK HERE
ARTIST TALK
Wednesday 22 July
The Exhibition Research Lab Gallery, John Moores University
Start: 2pm
Estimated finish time: 4pm
Price: FREE – Register to attend
MORE INFORMATION ON THE ARTISTS
- Farah Maktari: London-based artist and writer, exploring how to regain agency over Middle Eastern heritage by creating fictional archives and artefacts to ignite speculative identities. Working across the art sector, she reconceptualises what heritage can entail intertwining cultural memory, Arab-futurism, and surrealist principles through painting, textiles, and publications.
‘Cultural Reinvention’ forms a new dialogue with the past by reinventing the image of the veil. While exploring traditional dress in the Middle East & North African region, this piece integrates design and pattern principles into more contemporary and modern formats to present how tradition can elevate our identity and communities. Here the history of Yemeni women through garments is weaved together to reinterpret the depiction of regional traditions. In a celebration for culture to grow and change, Cultural Reinvention voices hidden histories and potential futures of what heritage can entail.
Entities of S.H.E.B.A. (2025)
This photo Series of three delves into the shapeshifting character of the Queen of Sheba, a calling for home through the historical and mythical. The figure becomes a chess life sculpture that echoes the many iterations of the Sheba through history, religion, and folklore, while Musnad, an ancient Arabian language, inspires the shape of the helmet worn. Working through their shape, it refers to the Arab art movement Letterism, which emancipates the letters from their meaning in an act of political liberation.
The sublime ambiguity formed by the captured face of Sheba embodies a state of disquieting presence of the future and past interweaving. Here, an entity of what shifting heritage can be is found through her as a portal to the unknown.
- Lydia Saidi:
Lydia Saidi was born in 1994 in Algiers, Algeria and is based in Paris, France. She is a photographer and image researcher. Her work focuses on issues of freedom, social constraints, and memory, by photographing various subjects in Algeria: Hirak protests, the history of slavery, and feminist issues.
“They’ve brought Us, they’ve sold Us” is a project delving into the legacy of slavery in Algeria through the lens of Diwan music, a variant of Gnawa music. Nestled in Ghardaïa, within the Mzab Valley, a city once pivotal in the caravan routes of slaves across the Algerian desert, the musical culture serves as a poignant repository of historical memory. Ritual ceremonies, songs, dances, and the personal recollections of the residents all contribute to the preservation of this profound heritage.
This series embarks on a journey to connect with Malika, a Diwan musician in Ghardaïa, whose grandfather endured the hardships of slavery. Alongside her family of musicians, they invited into their daily lives, offering insights into the Diwan culture. The series takes its name from a refrain within a Diwan song, echoing the sentiment, “They brought us from Sudan, they sold us” at a meagre price.
- Shareef Sarhan: (Gaza, 1976) is a visual artist and photographer. He is a founding member of Shababeek for Contemporary Art and a member of the Palestinian Artists Association. Sarhan earned his university degree in Art. He attended the Darat Al Funun Academy in Jordan.
He received the Bronze Award at the Arab Photographers Festival in 2008 and the Recognition Award in 2007. Sarhan produced an illustrated book titled “Gaza Live.” His work has been exhibited in Gaza, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Amman, the United States, France, Germany and Italy.
From the series “Gaza I love you!”:
Gaza is not just a city — it is a memory that breathes through the rubble, a call that still resonates in our hearts, even when everything has gone dark. These photographs form a visual journey from 2005 to 2023, an attempt to capture the textures of everyday life before it was swallowed by dust. In these images, concrete becomes a skin that holds the imprints of faces, the sea a mirror of memory, and children the guardians of light.
Each photograph was an act of survival, an exercise in love in the face of annihilation — art becoming an essential breath as the horizon narrowed to its own ruins. “Gaza… I love you!” is not just a phrase, but a recognition that art can be a homeland, and that memory, transposed into image, becomes resistance.
Abdullrhman Hassona is a visual artist and educator specialising in mixed‑media social documentary. His practice focuses on people, communities, and the personal stories that shape their lived experiences.
He has worked with charitable organisations across Africa and Asia, gaining close exposure to diverse cultures and lived realities. In the UK, his work has developed through close creative collaboration with refugee communities, informing a body of work rooted in human connection, memory, and belonging.
Hassona’s recent exhibitions include Waiting Rooms (2025), presented at The World of Glass and Street and a Half in partnership with Open Eye Gallery, and People of St Helens (2022), commissioned by Heart of Glass. In 2026, he was awarded Artist / Creative of the Year at the Liverpool City Region Culture and Creativity Awards, recognising his contribution to socially engaged visual storytelling.
The video installation 1:1 Insān is a series of live black-and-white video portraits presented in silence. Six participants from Palestine, Kurdistan, Somalia, El Salvador, and Britain remain still before the camera, creating an intimate 1:1 encounter with the viewer. Each portrait is accompanied by a personal audio layer – music tied to memory and a spoken narrative reflecting their relationship with home.
- Houari Bouchenak (IN THE BEGINNING IS THE LANDSCAPE) – video installation (2’59):
“IN THE BEGINNING IS THE LANDSCAPE, understood as the setting where the being comes into being, then into consciousness. And also at the end. And likewise, in the in-between.” Mohammed Dib – Tlemcen or the Places of Writing.
The notion of landscape was born during the Renaissance. It was a pictorial genre based on the aestheticization of reality, in an artistic approach. From the outset, landscape was associated as much with the city as with the countryside. Subsequently, landscape painting developed its aesthetic dimension to produce increasingly structured images of nature. This movement of idealizing nature forged in the minds of contemporaries a relationship to their environment that led, within a few decades, to a general shift in perspective on nature. Ultimately, landscape is not a clearly defined object, a thing; it is a relationship that one establishes between oneself and space.
Landscape is a space, but a relatively limited one. Like a photograph, the view composes a landscape with its boundaries, its frame, its scales. What lies beyond the frame can then be very different, as can what we don’t see beyond the horizon. This is why the landscape, a scientific tool for geographers, was not sufficient for them to gain an overall vision and perspective. It became necessary to invent the opposite of landscape: the map, the creation of an instrument to avoid thinking about the world directly from what is obvious and visible. When we are born, we are born into a space, but also into a time that is closely linked to that space. It is something that precedes us, that we will carry within us, both space and time, that will leave its imprint, settling into our consciousness and its dynamics. We must draw all the consequences of this paradox: on the one hand, the past is not over; On the other hand, the future is not written. If our image of the past is the product of an activity by which we refer back to the past what is realized in the state of possibility, this means that the image of the past is constantly being built up, that “there is a constant reshaping of the past by the present, of cause by effect.
Bio: Houari Bouchenak (Oran, Algeria), curator with a visual arts practice. His research is a perpetual exploration of the human condition through spaces and times marked by narrative, displacement and trace. For him, the medium of the image is a language, but also a field of artistic and curatorial experimentation, fuelled by the desire to regenerate creation through the immanent action of praxis. Co-founder of Collective 220 and founder of the Maison de la Photographie in Tlemcen, he combines artistic practice with academic research; he is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona.
- Maya-Ines Touam (Icare, the revenant):
Maya Inès Touam is a French-Algerian visual artist and photographer born in Paris in 1988. She lives and works between Paris and Aubervilliers, France.
A graduate of the Beaux-Arts in Paris, Maya Inès Touam’s work has been exhibited in many public institutions, art galleries, and foundations in France and internationally.
Her solo exhibitions include such places as Le Manège (Dakar, 2024), Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire (Paris, 2023), Fondation H (Paris, 2021), and MAACAL (Casablanca, 2018). She has been invited to participate in group exhibitions at Huis Marseille (Amsterdam, 2025), the Fridman Gallery (New York, 2024), and the Musée national de l’histoire de l’Immigration (Paris, 2022). Her photographs have been featured in international festivals such as the Tasweer Photo Festival in Doha (Qatar, 2025) and the Lagos Photo Festival (Nigeria, 2019), and she was selected and presented at the Rencontres de la Photographie International Festival in Arles (France, 2022) as part of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award. Maya Inès Touam has been invited for research and production residencies in Senegal with the Fonds de dotation Compagnie Fruitière (2024), in Benin at the Fondation Zinsou (2022), and in Marrakech with the Montresso Art Foundation (2018).
Her works have been acquired by public and private collections, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, USA, and the Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. Maya Inès Touam is also involved in educational activities, giving lectures and teaching photography in French middle schools, high schools, and universities. In 2025, she will collaborate with the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris for an upcoming exhibition. She is currently a resident at the Poush artists’ studios in Aubervilliers and is represented by the Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris.
Icar, the Revenant (2020):
This photograph reactivates the myth of Icarus, drawing inspiration from Henri Matisse’s famous collage. This echo is not merely formal; it reflects our contemporary world. The fragment borrowed from the artist oscillates between bold homage and societal observation.Matisse’s Icarus (1943–1944) is an enigmatic work. The black shape reveals a body suspended between sky and sea, evoking Baudelaire’s “Albatross,” a majestic and constrained bird, but also the Egungun ceremonies discovered in Benin. The body’s extension and torsion recall the energy of Vodou’s transcendental dances. The costumes made for these rituals, adorned with animal figures and expansive forms, resonate with the rounded arms of Matisse’s figure, resembling outstretched wings. The Egungun cult, celebrating the dead and their memory, provides an additional key for interpretation.
Transposed into this photograph, the ritual reveals the metaphor of an exile — Harraga — suspended in a frozen moment. Icar, the Revenant examines stories of displacement, what people leave behind, and what they gather to rebuild themselves. It also highlights those who can no longer speak, lost at sea.
About the exhibition partner:
Exhibition Research Lab (ERL) is proud to host Liverpool Arab Arts Festival’s exhibition ‘The Refuge’ in July 2026. Based at Liverpool John Moores University, ERL is a research-led gallery and curatorial platform that brings together academic inquiry, experimental exhibition-making and public engagement.
“We supports LAAF’s visual arts programme because it creates vital space for artists whose work opens up urgent conversations about culture, memory, migration, identity and belonging.”
The Refuge explores the idea of home through the perspectives of contemporary artists working across photography and moving image, reflecting the diverse ways home may be rooted in place, carried through heritage, or shaped by memory and movement. ERL is committed to supporting ambitious, critically-engaged projects that connect artistic practice with wider social and cultural questions, and we are delighted to partner with LAAF in presenting work that speaks so powerfully to Liverpool’s communities and to contemporary global experience.
