DAHLIA ELSAYED
Temporary Arrangements
February 5 – June 30, 2025
We are thrilled to present new artworks by Dahlia Elsayed created during her year-long artist-in-residence with SHINE Portrait Studio at Express Newark. Temporary Arrangements presents two interconnected bodies of work by artist Dahlia Elsayed that challenge the notion of place as something fixed or permanent, instead framing it as something sustained through ritual acts of making and remaking.
In SHINE’s main studio, Elsayed has created Scenes for Seeing, a participatory portrait studio furnished with handcrafted props – intricately patterned textiles, backdrops, and wearable pieces that serve as building blocks for community-generated photographs. These modular elements invite intentional acts of arrangement and composition, allowing participants to construct temporary environments that reflect their own narratives, memories or future visions.
The Changing Room features documentation of another type of ritual, Elsayed's repeated practice of arranging, layering and recombining scrap fragments of her paintings into compositions of new topographies. These delicate assemblages mirror SHINE Portrait Studio's objects with an emphasis on impermanence and reconfiguration, as each composition presents a momentary pause in an ongoing process of transformation.
Outside of the SHINE, in Express Newark's Box Gallery, Elsayed and artist Andrew Demirjian, have collaborated to create an installation entitled Subtle Centers transforming the gallery into an invented outdoor courtyard featuring mirrored reflection, moving sounds, and tangible objects, the space offers an invitation from the material world.
Each of these projects speak to the fluid concepts of place and belonging. Elsayed’s projects visually present the continual practice of preservation and renewal, memory and imagination. The ritual of assembly and reassembly – whether collaborative or individual – allows multiple narratives to coexist, evolve and be reinvented within the same space.
Dahlia Elsayed uses visual elements of landscape, cartography, and cosmology to make myth pictures for placelessness: visual documents that recount unreliable oral histories and anticipate alternate futures. Her paintings, prints, textiles and installations use a symbolic vocabulary rooted in Southwest Asian & North African decorative traditions - lush, colorful, fantastical, immersive - that make reference to the actual landscape experiences of displacement over multiple generations of her family.