Ahmed Alaqra

Biography:

Ahmed Alaqra is a Palestinian artist, architect, and curator whose practice interrogates the visual and material languages that shape our public realms. Working across photography, text, installation, and archival forms, he explores how meaning is constructed around everyday objects. His approach often centres on processes of unmaking and unlearning, challenging dominant narratives and opening space for alternative ways of seeing and learning.

Alaqra has curated exhibitions across Europe and the Arab world, with recent projects including I Will Write Our Will Above the Clouds, a touring exhibition, and Salt-Kissed at Hayy Jameel in Jeddah. His work has also been presented at institutions such as the Qattan Foundation, ICD Brookfield Place, the Spore Initiative, and POUSH. Alaqra is the co-founder of the FANA’ Collective and EL-GORFEH - Palestine’s first community darkroom - both serving as experimental platforms for shared making, reflection, and collective agency. Currently, he is a fellow of the Arab Documentary Photography Program (ADPP).

Artwork Overview:
I remember. a light is a sculptural installation composed of translucent resin cubes, each containing the shape of a specific shadow. Sourced and modeled from analogue photographs taken in Sharjah - where the artist grew up - and Dubai, these shadows are not dramatic or iconic, but drawn from quiet, everyday interactions between light and urban surfaces: a stairwell’s edge, the lattice pattern cast by a palm, the brief shelter beneath a car. The work is both recollection and structure - a quiet archive of ephemeral contact between city, body, and sun.

Each cube is filled with three-dimensional form of a shadow, transforming a fleeting moment into a lasting form. The cubes are then assembled on shelves with free-standing 3D- printed shadows, forming library like structures. From a distance, the installation reads as a collection; up close, it reveals a series of intimate moments - preserved impressions of light meeting material and then moving on. The work draws conceptual resonance from the mashrabiya, a traditional architectural element that filters light, air, and visibility. Like the mashrabiya, the cubes modulate perception - offering thresholds rather than images, and memory instead of monumentality.

Alaqra’s broader practice often explores deformation as a form of spatial reclamation. Here, that approach is reflected in the inversion of shadow from negative space into sculptural volume. The result is an installation that reflects on light not as illumination, but as encounter.