Oblivion

Oblivion is a group exhibition at XVA Gallery in the Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood, Dubai, open from 28 July to 21 October 2026. Presented by the gallery as its summer show, it gathers eighteen artists, among them Halim Al Karim, Mahmoud Hamadani, Behdad Lahooti and Nada Debs. The works are objects and installations in metal, textile and found or fabricated materials. Among the household things on show, the gallery names a hairbrush and an armchair.

The gallery's text builds the show around forgetting. In its account, letting a memory go makes room rather than leaving a gap, and an ordinary object that loses its everyday use can take on a new role. The gallery reads this change as a gain.

Installation views published by the gallery show the works set through the rooms of a heritage house with timber-beam ceilings and lattice openings. A gilded armchair upholstered in printed fabric stands on a printed rug. Pastel-coloured casts of a sewing machine, a table lamp, an iron and a hairbrush sit on black plinths, and a ladder shelf holds small objects. Elsewhere are a blue cast figure with outstretched wings, a wall of coloured hexagonal cut-outs and mirrored hexagons, and a framed beadwork-style panel spelling GREEN. There are also painted wooden posts patterned with dots, a hanging fringed textile and large framed abstract works on paper. Smaller pieces include a house on legs, a green spiky sphere and a sculpture of nested blue wire cubes. The gallery does not caption the works or say how many are shown.

Several exhibitors have artist pages at XVA. Behdad Lahooti, an Iranian sculptor born in Tehran in 1976, works mainly in metal and held his solo exhibition The Paradox of Imaginary Objects at the gallery in 2025. Halim Al Karim, an Iraqi artist born in Najaf in 1963, works mainly in photography. In 2011 he was one of six artists in Iraq's pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. Mahmoud Hamadani, an Iranian artist born in 1958 who lives in New York, makes ink drawings and steel sculpture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum hold his work. XVA Gallery opened in 2003 and concentrates on artists from the Arab world and South Asia.