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NOW: 3RD ST.

August 13 - 30, 2026

BEYOND THE IMAGE

Ridikkuluz, Umber Majeed, Layal Srouji, Nouf Aljowaysir, Ali Van Godil, Parham Ghalamdar, Noel Maghathe,  Aya Krisht, Iyad Abou Gaida, Sabri Sundos, Mona Saeed Kamal


All Street Gallery and Shadowbanned Magazine are pleased to present Beyond the Image: A Benefit Exhibition for the Sameer Project, a group exhibition bringing together eleven artists whose work examines how images of the Middle East and its diasporas get made — and who has the power to make them. Beyond the Image is presented as a benefit exhibition. A portion of proceeds from sales will go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid initiative delivering food, water, medical care, and shelter to displaced families across Gaza.

Working across painting, sculpture, digital collage, artificial intelligence, printmaking, textiles, and text, the artists in Beyond the Image treat representation not as a record to be recovered but as a process to be exposed. Their materials — family photographs, colonial archives, inherited visual traditions, political symbols, found letters and manipulated generative imagery — are shaped by memory, power, and omission. Beyond the Image asks what these materials reveal when they are fragmented, obscured, woven, or made strange, rather than smoothed into a single legible pict ure.

That question turns first on visibility itself. To be seen can mean to be recognized, but it can also mean to be categorized, surveilled, or reduced to a familiar type. The exhibition's opening works hold both possibilities at once. Ridikkuluz's tightly cropped portrait of an Arab American claims an intimacy that resists ethnographic distance: against a vivid blue background, the keffiyeh and agal appear alongside faces and gazes placed at the center of each composition. The portrait complicates straightforward legibility; additional eyes give the painting an unsettling sense that any single image gives a stable or complete view of its subject.

Nouf Alojaway's Ancestral Seeds takes the same question into the machinery of recognition itself. Generated with StyleGAN3 from a dataset drawn partly from photographs associated with British colonial administrator Gertrude Bell, the series exposes how colonial archives continue to train contemporary AI's image of Middle Eastern people, and how that training resurfaces as the misreading of ordinary images through associations with war and terrorism. Alojaway's response is subtractive: she removes the human figures from her generated scenes and replaces them with light. The resulting silhouettes evoke absent elders and eroded family histories while withholding their subjects from the systems, and viewers, that would otherwise define them.

If Alojaway shows what technology does to memory, Noel Magh and Aya Krisht show what time and violence do to it. Magh braids family portraits into pixelated textile surfaces, interlacing generations so that some figures emerge from the weave while others dissolve into it. The distortion itself becomes evidence of how fragile an archive is. Aya's monochromatic prints put the body under comparable pressure: saturated fields of red register urgency and loss without supplying the generalized, consumable imagery through which Middle Eastern violence is often packaged for outside viewers. In both practices, the image doesn't recover from rupture, it centralizes it.

Language undergoes the same treatment. Layal Srouji breaks Arabic found letters into fragments and redistributes them across muted compositions, treating text as a visual inheritance that can be dismantled and reassembled rather than simply read. Iyad Abou Gaida works in the opposite direction, toward density rather than dispersal: adapting the scale and narrative structure of fifteenth-century Persian, Mughal, and Islamic miniature painting, he fills digital collages with masked fighters, guns, the Zulfiqar sword, and national symbols, using text and recognizable imagery with a directness that confronts how naming and labeling shape the politics of war. Between them, the two artists mark the range available for handling language under pressure: dispersing it until new structures appear, or wielding it plainly enough to make its political stakes impossible to miss. Drawing upon similar text-based iconography, Sabri Sundos uses lithography to impose repeating loops and x’s upon a series of floating heads. Sundos’ work emphasizes the human nature of creation, drawing upon his Palestinian heritage and themes of time and labor, to create intricate abstractions constructing delicate commentaries of labor. 

Parham Ghalamdar's sculptures push this same instability into physical form. A ceramic object resembling an airplane is worked over until its material identity blurs — weapon, fossil, relic, alien body all at once — as if the machinery of aerial violence had already entered the historical record as artifact. His engraved aluminum plates make the mechanism more explicit: inclined geometries read simultaneously as ascent and descent, aircraft rising and ordnance falling, fixing in metal the unequal structure of who watches from above and who is watched from below.

Turning to her own familial history and archives, Umber Majeed reimagines her uncle's failed tourism company, Trans-Pakistan, as the fictional Trans-Pakistan Adventure Services. Drawing on this speculative framework, Majeed interrogates the intersecting histories of tourism, nationalism, environmental collapse, and cultural identity through a series of double-sided works that require viewers to physically navigate between opposing perspectives. On the double-sided pieces, Majeed stages one side with the iconography of climate catastrophe and public warning—icebergs, recycling symbols, caution signs—within distorted, faintly absurd landscapes, while the reverse presents intertwined hands arranged in cyclical formations that simultaneously suggest solidarity, entrapment, and interdependence. By compelling viewers to move between the two surfaces, Majeed extends the works' above/below asymmetry into broader environmental and social terms. Absurdity becomes not an escape from catastrophe but an honest register for how catastrophe is experienced and communicated: disorienting, recursive, and perpetually unresolved.

Ali Godli's paintings mark a shift in register: where the preceding artists work from specific archives, photographs, and political symbols, his practice turns inward, seeking to channel a higher frequency through abstraction. His paintings draw from no fixed source material, allowing vivid lines to curve and collide against neutral grounds without stable referents. In Bridge of Creation, that abstraction begins to resolve into figuration, with Arabic script hovering above the image of a small animal. Positioned at the end of the exhibition, Godli's work suggests that reconstruction is not only an act of recovering history but also of tuning into forms of knowledge, spirituality, and connection that exist beyond documentation.

Kamal. Since 2014, Kamal has created intimate gouache drawings rooted in observations of the natural world. For Kamal, the act of painting is itself a meditative practice, using repetition and careful attention as a means of quiet reflection. While Godli channels an unseen frequency through gestural abstraction, Kamal arrives at a similar spiritual register through sustained engagement with nature, inviting viewers into a space where contemplation becomes a form of connection that transcends language, geography, and borders.

Across eleven practices and as many materials, Beyond the Image resists a single expectation: that an image should give uncomplicated access to a person, a place, or a history. Faces stay intimate but partly unreadable. Archives illuminate and erase in the same gesture. Technologies sold as new turn out to inherit old habits of looking. The exhibition treats this not as representation's failure but as its actual condition, and proposes that the way through it is not a clearer picture, but a more honest account of what any picture leaves out.

Opening



About the Artists

Ridikkuluz is an Arab New Yorker working across painting, sculpture, performance, and writing to center family, chosen family, and intimate portrayals of Arab and queer life. Rooted in figurative practice, their work transforms personal memory into collective testimony. Their work has been exhibited internationally at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Hudson River Museum, Metropolitan Arts Centre, and Montréal arts interculturels. In 2026, they made their curatorial debut with [minna | منا]ᵒᶠ ᵘˢ at Participant Inc in collaboration with SALMA.

Umber Majeed, a New York-native, is a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016 and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. She lives and works in New York, USA and Lahore, Pakistan.  

Layal Srouji’s practice is one that foregrounds relation, iteration, and tactile knowledge. Working with graphic design, paper, print, book making, and found media, she is attentive to how heritage accumulates through materials and their social engagement. Often, her references emerge from socially engaged- collective research, collaboration, workshops. Her body of work addresses the urgent need to nourish Palestine materially.

Nouf Aljowaysir is a Saudi artist based in NYC. Her practice emerges from the conditions of migration and moving between cultures. Working across photography and moving image, she weaves technological tools, archival materials, and personal memories to understand history and identity. She uses dialogue with machines as a method for examining how those exchanges reshape the performance of the self.

Ali Van Godil is a New York and Oregon based designer, artist, creative director and filmmaker who believes in the power of beauty to create universally harmonious art, designs, and productions. His practice explores the emotional and spiritual architecture of belonging, how memory, migration, landscape, and sacred tradition shape identity and inner life. Rooted in a Pakistani upbringing, informed by Islamic and Indian spiritual philosophy, and deeply influenced by the natural world of Oregon, the work reflects a lifelong dialogue between earth and transcendence, body and soul, tradition and becoming. The conceptual framework of his work centers on translation: translating inner states into form, ancestral memory into contemporary language, and spiritual longing into visual presence. 

Parham Ghalamdar is a multidisciplinary artist. Ghalamdar’s work traces forgotten mythologies, buried philosophies, and visual ruins, reconfiguring them into speculative worlds where memory, fiction, and futurism collapse into one another. Drawing on cybernetic theory and generative AI, he explores how systems of feedback, simulation, and machine vision mediate our understanding of history and possibility. Through painting, film, and writing, he builds narratives that feel both ancient and yet-to-come, haunted by lost histories and animated by possible futures.

Noel Maghathe is a Palestinian-American multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Cincinnati, Ohio, whose practice spans performance, installation, and community engagement . Nawal Maghathe is working with photographs printed on fabric, and beeswax sculptures. In their multidisciplinary practice, Maghathe creates immersive installations that explore themes of healing, memory, and cultural identity.

Aya Krisht is a designer, printmaker, and researcher based in metro Detroit, with roots in the Galilee. Her practice is concerned with print praxis and anti-colonial cultural production, particularly in the face of imperial hegemonies and erasure, with a focus on printmaking, book arts, and Arabic letterpress and movable type. She is co-founder of Maamoul Press, an award-winning independent publishing project.

Iyad Abou Gaida is a Lebanese farmer, filmmaker, ecological designer, and researcher from Hasbaya, South Lebanon. Raised on his family's olive groves, which have been cultivated for generations, his interdisciplinary practice emerges from a lifelong relationship with the land and investigates the intersections of ecology, colonialism, extractive capitalism, ecocide, and land stewardship through long-term, multi-modular artistic research projects that unfold across documentary film, drawing, mapping, installation, publishing, and collaborative field research.

Sabri Sundos is a Palestinian American painter & textile artist. Rooted in his personal experience being raised in the diaspora, sundos explores themes of identity, labor and time.Through the merging of traditional craft and cultural iconography his work emphasizes the importance of agency & human touch, highlighting the inherent tactile nature of art-making as a means of reclaiming and preserving heritage. Sundos creates work that continues to foster dialogue around tradition, memory, and an undying hope for the future.Sundos is also the founder of Unibrow Sun, an organization focused on uplifting narratives of solidarity through art & education

Mona Saeed Kamal is a multidisciplinary installation artist whose work explores narratives of migration, journeys, and identity. Through examinations of religion, ethnicity, conflict, and borders, she creates stories that confront both her own lived experiences and the lives of people across the many cultures and places to which she is connected. Informed by her migratory upbringing—born in Algeria, raised in Canada, and currently based in New York—Kamal’s work draws from these intersecting histories to examine the complexities of belonging, displacement, and cultural inheritance. Her installations invite viewers to consider how personal and collective histories shape identity across borders and generations.

About Shadowbanned Magazine
Founded in 2024, Shadowbanned Magazine is an independent print publication and cultural platform dedicated to amplifying marginalized and working class voices through journalism, art, and culture. Shadowbanned Magazine exists to challenge systems of power by creating space for journalism, art, and critical thought that might otherwise be marginalized, censored, or overlooked. 


About All Street Gallery
Founded in 2018, All Street Gallery is a gallery and platform for emerging and underrepresented artists whose work focuses on social engagement and community empowerment. Initially created as an artist collective and grassroots protest organization, All Street is driven by its roots in the city’s creative community. The gallery’s mission is to use art as a means of protest, resistance, and social change, highlighting voices that challenge the status quo. After opening its first location on East Third Street in the East Village, All Street expanded in 2023 with a second space at 119 Hester Street. Both locations continue to provide a platform for artists whose work addresses important social and political issues.