ALSERKAL AVENUE · DUBAI
Reading time: 9 minEvery notice of this exhibition described it as a show about motherhood, which is accurate, and there is a further route in. The most revealing is the object Aidha Badr keeps returning to: a mass-produced toy horse, painted opened up, its manufacture exposed.
I’m Never Coming Back, at Firetti Contemporary in Dubai from 19 September to 7 November 2025, was presented in collaboration with Hunna Art and curated by Hunna’s founder Océane Sailly. It was a solo show of new oil paintings by Aidha Badr, and its stated subject was the shift from being a daughter to being a mother.
That framing is true, and this show gives it something entirely its own. What distinguishes it is an object.
Across the show, a horse recurs. Not one horse but a sequence of them, and crucially not all of them are alive. Some are toys. One of them has been taken apart. Follow that object through the room and the exhibition stops being a statement about a life change and becomes something more precise: a study of what a manufactured stand-in is for, and what happens when you open it.
A toy horse is a designed object
It is worth being literal about what a toy horse is before deciding what it means.
It is a mass-produced consumer object, engineered down to a price. It has a mould line or a seam. It has an interior that is not the interior of a horse: stuffing, hollow plastic, sometimes a wire armature. Its proportions are not the animal’s proportions but a caricature of them, with the head enlarged and the legs thickened, because those are the changes that survive injection moulding and a child’s grip. It is designed to be handled hard and to be recognisable at a glance.
In other words it is an object that has been through a full industrial design process in order to stand in for something living, and every decision in it is a compromise between resemblance and manufacture.
Badr paints one of these dissected. Cut open, its inside showing. Read as symbol, it speaks to the fragmentation and reconstruction of the self, and that reading holds.
Read as an object, it is sharper than that. Opening a toy exposes the gap between what it depicts and how it is made. The outside is a horse. The inside is a manufacturing process. That is an unusually exact figure for the subject the show is actually circling, which is the distance between the idealised exterior of a role and the structure holding it up.
She could have painted a broken horse, or an old one, or an abandoned one. She painted a dismantled one, which is a different act. Breaking is something that happens to an object. Dissection is something you do to it deliberately, and it is what you do when you want to know how a thing works.
The sequence reads like a design process
The horses do not appear randomly. They run as a progression, and the shape of that progression is the most formally interesting thing in the show.
It starts with fragile toys. It moves to foals, caught mid-movement, tentative, all leg and no control. It resolves with a fully formed adult horse set beside its toy counterpart, the real animal now dominant and the toy still present.
Anyone who has worked through a design process will recognise that sequence, because it is the one pinned to the wall at the end of a project: the rough model, the working prototypes, the finished object photographed next to the model it came from. The maquette does not get thrown away when the real thing arrives. It gets kept, and it gets smaller by comparison.
Badr runs it the same way, and the decision not to discard the toy at the end is the whole argument. A simpler show would have ended with the horse alone, the childish version outgrown and gone. Keeping the toy in the final composition says something more difficult and more accurate: the stand-in is not replaced by the real thing, it is outscaled by it while remaining in the room.
This is also where the exhibition earns its title. I’m Never Coming Back sounds like a slammed door. The sequence says otherwise. Nothing has been left; something has been added, and the proportions between the two have changed permanently.
Handwriting is the anti-typeface
Threaded through the canvases are fragments of handwritten text. Stay with me a little longer. Nothing ever happens, which is also the title of one of the largest works.
Text on a painting asks a great deal of a picture, because a picture can end up leaning on its caption. These carry it, and the reason is the choice of hand rather than type.
A typeface is designed to be reproducible, legible at scale and identical every time it is set. Handwriting is the opposite specification. It cannot be reproduced, it varies with pressure and fatigue, and it carries the physical state of the person making it. In a body of work about becoming someone new while remaining recognisably yourself, unrepeatable lettering is not decoration. It is the only lettering that matches the subject.
The restraint matters too. These are short fragments, not passages, and they sit as thoughts rather than statements. Nothing ever happens on a canvas measuring 200 by 138 centimetres is a very large surface given to a very small admission, and that mismatch between the scale of the support and the scale of the sentence is doing real work.
The Madonna is a format, and it is being dismantled
The self-portraits have been described as fragmented, restrained, and positioned as a distant Madonna figure. That description is usually offered as tone. It is more useful as structure.
The Madonna and Child is one of the most tightly engineered compositional formats in Western painting. It is built on an enclosing arc, a stable triangle, and the child held inside the mother’s silhouette so that the two read as a single mass. Everything about it is designed to communicate containment and permanence, and it does that so efficiently that the format survived several centuries with the geometry more or less intact.
Badr fragments it. The figure is broken up, the enclosure is not complete, the authority of the format is invoked and then withheld. Reading that as sadness or distance is available and true. Read structurally, the show takes the single most reassuring composition in the canon and removes the parts that make it reassuring, which is a bold thing to do with it.
Set that alongside the dissected toy and a pattern appears. Both are acts of opening a closed, familiar, reassuring form to see what is inside. One is an object, one is a compositional convention. The method is the same.
Two galleries and one room
The production side deserves a note, because it is a small illustration of how the Dubai gallery scene actually functions.
Firetti Contemporary occupies Warehouse 29 at Alserkal Avenue, the Al Quoz industrial estate that became the city’s contemporary art district. The Dubai gallery opened in 2021, founded by Mara Firetti, an Italian raised in Kaduna, Nigeria, who came to the art world from real estate and art investment and built her programme around an idea of art as a vehicle for social engagement.
Hunna Art was founded in 2021 by Océane Sailly, who wrote her second master’s thesis on the UAE art market and the region’s institutional history. Hunna represents emerging women artists from or connected to the Arabian Peninsula and its diaspora, and until it opened a permanent space in Kuwait in October 2024 it operated without a room of its own, working through fairs, residencies and programming across the Peninsula and Europe.
So the show is a gallery with a Dubai warehouse hosting a gallery whose base is elsewhere, with the visiting gallery’s founder acting as curator. That arrangement is common enough in the region that it passes without comment, and it should not, because it is one of the more effective structures the Gulf art scene has produced. A curatorial position can be built without a lease. The building is the variable, not the programme.
For an artist, the practical consequence is that the work reaches a d3 and Alserkal audience through a curator who has followed the practice for years rather than through a gallery that has just discovered it. Badr had already shown with Hunna in Dubai in 2022, with When I Desire You A Part Of Me Is Gone. This was a continuation, not an introduction, and that shows in how confidently the sequence is built.
Where it holds
Two observations, both worth stating plainly.
The first is the text. It works when it is short and admits something, and that is how Badr uses it, as a private note rather than a slogan. An open phrase keeps a picture open, and these paintings are at their best unresolved. The written phrases are pitched to leave them exactly that way.
The second is the horse itself. It is a generous symbol: strength, freedom, transformation, childhood, escape, all available at once. Symbols that hold that many meanings need an anchor, and these have one. Badr keeps returning to the physical particulars, the seam, the stuffing, the awkward legs of a foal, rather than to the idea of a horse, and those particulars hold the symbol steady from one canvas to the next.
Both point the same way. This is a young painter working at scale on material this close to home and keeping her footing throughout, and the show carries far more than any short framing around it can hold.
Frequently asked questions
What was I’m Never Coming Back? It was a solo exhibition of new oil paintings by Aidha Badr at Firetti Contemporary, Dubai, running from 19 September to 7 November 2025, presented in collaboration with Hunna Art and curated by Océane Sailly. Its subject was the shift in identity that accompanies becoming a mother.
Who is Aidha Badr? Aidha Badr was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1996 and is an Egyptian American painter based in Dubai. She holds a BFA from Binghamton University in New York, where her training focused on portraiture, and received the Novogrodsky Memorial Award for Artistic Pursuits in 2017. Her earlier solo exhibitions include Fomo at Artspace, Kuwait, in 2017, As Above So Below at Dar Al Funoon, Kuwait, in 2018, and When I Desire You A Part Of Me Is Gone with Hunna Art in Dubai in 2022.
What does the horse mean in Badr’s work? Badr has described it in terms of accepting change without fighting it, moving forward quietly rather than running or escaping. In the exhibition the motif runs as a sequence, from fragile toy horses through tentative foals to a fully formed adult set beside its toy version.
Where is Firetti Contemporary? Firetti Contemporary occupies Warehouse 29 at Alserkal Avenue in Al Quoz, Dubai. The gallery was founded by Mara Firetti and opened its Alserkal space in 2021.
What is Hunna Art? Hunna Art is a contemporary gallery founded in 2021 by Océane Sailly, representing emerging women artists from or connected to the Arabian Peninsula and its diaspora. It works through exhibitions, fairs and residencies across the Peninsula and Europe, and opened its first permanent space in Kuwait in October 2024.
What were the main works in the exhibition? Works included Everything Endlessly (2025), oil on canvas, 210 by 290 cm; Nothing Ever Happens (2025), 200 by 138 cm; I Am Not the Same and I Am Never Coming Back (2025), 143 by 106 cm; and I Was Born Knowing You (2025), 120 by 80 cm, alongside horse studies and fragmented self-portraits.
Final thoughts
The safe reading of this exhibition is the one about a woman becoming a mother, and it is not wrong. It is also the reading that was available before anyone walked into the room, and the room offers more.
What was actually on the walls was more particular and more useful. A young painter took a manufactured object, the kind of thing designed to stand in for something real and priced to be handled by a child, and opened it to see what was inside. Then she did the same thing to one of the most reassuring compositions in painting. Then she set the model beside the finished animal and declined to throw the model away.
That is a body of work about how things are made, which happens to be about motherhood. The order of those two clauses is what makes it an exhibition worth writing about.
Leave a Reply