The Canticle of the Birds

The Canticle of the Birds is a solo exhibition by the Paris-based French-Algerian artist and filmmaker Katia Kameli at Taymour Grahne Projects, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai. It opens on 23 September and runs until 11 November 2026.

The body of work reinterprets The Conference of the Birds, the 12th-century poem by Farid ud-Din Attar. Kameli works from Le Cantique des oiseaux, Leili Anvar's French verse translation. The gallery lists ceramic sound sculptures in the form of birds. They include Vulture and Simurgh (both 2025), Owl, Heron, Myna and Hoopoe (all 2026) and Wagtail (2022). Some of the watercolours on paper are set in ceramic frames.

Also listed are the video Canticle of the Birds (2022, eleven minutes) and the ink on silk work Seven Valleys (2023). Aube 1 and Aube 8 (2023) are watercolours on textile. Lucas Morin describes the bird sculptures played in the films as ocarinas made with the ceramicist Marie Picard. For the films Kameli worked with the composer Aurélie Sfez and the choreographer Youness Anzane. The 2022 video was commissioned by the Institut des cultures d'Islam and filmed in La Goutte-d'Or, Paris.

The exhibition text is by Lucas Morin, curator at Jameel Arts Centre. He writes that Kameli sees earthenware as a way to "make the land sing". He notes that the common myna is "the only bird in her array not found in the original poem". He adds that the species thrived alongside the UAE's urban expansion in the 1980s.

Kameli was born in 1973 and lives and works in Paris. Her project Stream of Stories (2015 to 2019) traced the history of animal fables, including their roots in Kalila wa Dimnah. In 2022 her solo exhibition Hier revient et je l'entends ran across Bétonsalon and the Institut des cultures d'Islam in Paris.