No night is long enough for us to dream twice
To the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish – whose poem A Raven’s Ink gives the exhibition No night is long enough for us to dream twice its title – dreaming is inseparable from the impossibility of return. You can revisit a memory or a dream, but never quite inhabit it in the same way again.
Rachel Cieśla, co-curator of the show (currently running at AGWA, the Art Gallery of Western Australia), explains how this slippery but generative quality of dreams is crucial to how she conceived the show. “What I hear in Darwish’s poem is that when we return to the place of the dream, we will find it changed, or, put otherwise, we cannot return to the same past unchanged,” Cieśla says. “The artists in this exhibition return to childhoods, cities, bodies and histories to find that something in the experience has shifted. Their photographs cannot resurrect the dead or restore what was lost, but they bring us into contact with an absence that continues to act upon the living.”
“The line between remembering and imagining is unintentionally thin,” shares an exhibiting artist, Mohammed Abdouni, whose intimate portraits document queer life and gender expression in Lebanon. Reflecting on the relationship between dreams and his photographic practice, he explains, “I’m usually left with fragments that I try to piece together, but I’ve learned to embrace that and not try to pass one for the other, but instead look for the whimsy in it.” It’s this uncertainty and search for alternative realities that underscores the curatorial context of No night is long enough for us to dream twice, which brings together nine artists from Southwest Asia, North Africa and their diasporas, including Abdouni, Hicham Benohoud, Myriam Boulos, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mohamed Bourouissa, Hannah Darabi, Abdulhamid Kircher and Sabiha Çimen.
Despite their shared geography, Cieśla says that the connection between the artists is less about where they come from than what happens within their images. “Although the artists are working from very different places and circumstances, their images operate through intensification,” she explains. “States of desire, terror, pleasure and intimacy accumulate until something erupts”. The curator sees this shared sensibility as a relationship to pressure. To her, pressure is a decisive moment pushed to its limits: a glance, a gesture or a fleeting encounter gathering emotional force until it becomes almost unbearable. “In that sense, we became interested in photography not as revelation but as a temporary symbolic gesture whose meaning emerges through the conditions of its appearance, and whose power lies partly in its refusal to resolve the world it depicts,” Cieśla explains.
In the work of artist Myriam Boulos, that pressure exists alongside an insistence on the inner lives we are so often taught to conceal. “As a kid I was told that my head was always ‘in the clouds’,” she tells Dazed. “My interior world has always been more present than the actual physical world considered to be reality.” Through her photography, Boulos makes these interior universes visible, finding space for desire, absurdity and intimacy amid the political realities of Lebanon. To Cieśla, Boulos’s images resist the flattening logic of photojournalism, refusing to let the experience of a place be reduced to a document of trauma.
As co-curator Dalia Al-Dujaili notes, the exhibition acknowledges the region’s histories of “protest, violence, rupture, suppression while making space for nuance and complexity”. The artists are not asked to stand in as a singular representative for their country or offer a myopic perspective of a conflict; their practice instead opens onto the messier, more contradictory business of living.
In Sabiha Çimen’s photography, that possibility is in the everyday lives of the girls she photographs in Quran schools. Her series Hafiz explores girlhood within highly structured environments, paying attention to the fantasies, friendships, boredom and mischief that unfold on the edges of discipline. “Daydreaming becomes a quiet space where another self can exist. I’m drawn to those trivial, drifting moments because they hold a private freedom no one can regulate. Darwish’s line reminds me that a dream is precious precisely because it can’t be repeated, so I try to catch it while it’s passing,” she says, reflecting on her own positionality as being one of those girls in Quran schools. As both a witness and, in the past, a participant, her photographs linger on moments that might otherwise go unnoticed: a girl lying on a bed, looking directly at the camera or laughing with her friends. “I don’t see resistance only in dramatic gestures,” she explains further. “Sometimes it is simply in the way a girl looks at the camera, lies on a bed, plays with her friends, or allows herself to dream.”
Mohammed Abdouni is similarly interested in photography as a way of creating temporary space beyond social, political or familial constraints. His practice offers moments of intimacy, while also providing an escape from his own “pressures of time and forgetfulness”. “Photography can be evidence, but it can also be slightly rearranged and shaped,” he explains, noting how the image is neither wholly documentary nor entirely invented but occupies the uncertain ground between the two.
This instability is part of what makes the exhibition feel so pertinent now. We are living through an endless accumulation of images, where photographs are screenshotted, reposted, edited, generated by AI and stripped of their original contexts at a dizzying speed. For Al-Dujaili, who works closely with photographers and image-makers as a writer and curator, photography is caught in a strange contradiction, “simultaneously the most important medium of our time and the most degraded and devalued”.
Bringing images into a gallery, she argues, changes our relationship with them, an especially meaningful proposition while working with artists from the SWANA region. “The gallery space not only gives an irreplaceable quality to a medium which is so easy to exploit, but it also affords these images a contextual richness which would otherwise allow for the image to take on infinite, bastardised meanings and usages,” Al-Dujaili explains. “Bringing images into the physical world changes our relationship with them drastically; we see them as singular objects and artworks, as opposed to a flat accumulation of pixels which we can screenshot, repost, delete and edit as we wish.”
No night is long enough for us to dream twice is currently on show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until 31 January 2027.