No night is long enough for us to dream twice

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) presents No night is long enough for us to dream twice, a major exhibition of contemporary photography and video, bringing together more than 100 works by seven living artists and one artist duo from across South West Asia, North Africa and its many diasporas.

The exhibiting artists span the South West Asia North Africa (SWANA) region — including Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Türkiye — with six artists presenting work in Australia for the first time, marking a significant moment of international exchange and visibility for these voices.

No night is long enough for us to dream twice features the work of Basel Abbas (born 1983, Nicosia) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (born 1983, Boston), Mohamad Abdouni (born 1989, Beirut), Hicham Benohoud (born 1968, Marrakech), Myriam Boulos (born 1992, Beirut), Mohamed Bourouissa (born 1978, Blida), Sabiha Çimen (born 1986, Istanbul), Hannah Darabi (born 1981, Tehran) and Abdulhamid Kircher (born 1996, Berlin).

Taking its title from a line by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the exhibition marks the debut appearances in Perth for all the participating artists. The exhibition also features images from three Magnum Photo members.

The artists work across different geographies, generations and photographic traditions, but all share a relation to pressure. Their photographs and videos seem to pulse at the limits of what they can contain — intensifying, rupturing and briefly giving form to experiences that resist resolution.

The exhibition consequently resists the familiar visual language through which the ‘Middle East’ is so often represented. Rather than reproducing images of crisis, conflict or victimhood, these artists foreground the unruly complexity of lived experience. Love, friendship, sexuality, fashion, family, pleasure, boredom, play and absurdity exist alongside displacement, violence, political repression and the weight of inherited histories.

This tension is held in the newest iteration of Abdulhamid Kircher’s large scale photographic installation, Rotting from within (2026), which incorporates 30 new video works within a dense collage of analog photographs, materials from his family archive and personal objects. The artist will create the work onsite at AGWA over a two-week period.

Sabiha Çimen’s photographs move through girlhood, faith, friendship and the interior worlds of young women, creating spaces in which intimacy and observation are constantly renegotiated. Hannah Darabi works through archives, memory and the political histories of Iran and its diaspora; Myriam Boulos works at the charged intersection of bodies, desire, protest and everyday life; while Mohamed Bourouissa uses video and photography to question the social and political structures embedded within its production. The personal is never simply separate from the political, but neither is it reduced to it.

For Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, the sampling and layering of moving image and sound are central to tracing struggles against dispossession and oppression in Palestine within a broader practice that engages the politics and poetics of anti-colonial resistance. Mohamad Abdouni turns towards intimacy, family and queer experience, creating photographs in which relationships become inseparable from questions of belonging and visibility. Hicham Benohoud brings humour and staged absurdity into the photographic frame, disrupting the authority of the image through theatricality and play.

At a moment when images are everywhere — and increasingly difficult to believe — the focus of this exhibition is relevant to all of us. Photography has become the dominant language through which contemporary life is recorded, circulated and remembered, while simultaneously being compressed, manipulated and endlessly reproduced. The role of the image has consistently been called into question in relation to the ongoing conflicts in war zones around the world. Between testimony and spectacle, archive and algorithm, the image has become both evidence and fiction, most potently in the region. The intrusion of artificial intelligence further complicates the question of visual literacy today. The works in No night is long enough for us to dream twice inhabit this instability rather than attempting to resolve it, embodying the uncertainty of the zeitgeist.