The soft lights of Al Hosh Gallery reflected off its white walls as it prepared to unveil an extraordinary dual exhibition titled “Out of Time.” It was more than an art event it was two intertwined worlds unfolding within one space, where Rashid Diab and Nedim Kufi each told their own story about time, memory, and human experience.
Rashid Diab, Beyond the Present
Inside the first section of the exhibition, Sudanese painter and printmaker Rashid Diab spoke through color, composition, and light. His figures wandered through desolate landscapes, transcending the present moment moving across the picture plane into imagined futures that reflected Sudan’s political and emotional realities. Every brushstroke carried the memory of his homeland the harmony of its light, the rhythm of its people, and the poetry of its silence.
Born in Sudan in 1957, Diab spent twenty years in Madrid, where he refined his artistic voice and completed a PhD titled “The Traditional and Contemporary in Sudanese Art.” His work, deeply rooted in African heritage yet open to modern dialogue, has been exhibited across the globe from Cairo to Taipei, from Spain to Kenya earning him numerous honors, including the Cross of the Order of Civil Merit from King Juan Carlos I of Spain.
His art seeks to define the structure of Sudanese and African expression — balancing tradition with innovation, introspection with universality. In Diab’s canvases, color becomes language, and time itself becomes a silent witness.
Nadim Kufi, Language as Space
In contrast, the second section of the exhibition invited visitors into a world built from words, letters, and the silence between them. Nadim Kufi, the Iraqi-Dutch multidisciplinary artist, transformed the Arabic script into a visual and emotional landscape. His art explored migration, displacement, and the fragile balance between East and West creating a reflective bridge where culture, identity, and memory intertwine.
Kufi’s minimalist approach conceals deep philosophical layers. For him, art is not just creation but contemplation a peaceful and intellectual process that questions how we perceive time, language, and self. Nature, repetition, and the written form all play essential roles in his work, where each letter holds both history and possibility.
Living in the Netherlands, far from his birthplace in Mesopotamia, Kufi has exhibited internationally, engaging in projects and collaborations that connect art with society, nature, and thought. His pieces invite viewers to see beyond what is written to imagine new constellations of meaning and to dwell, even briefly, outside of time.
Together, “Out of Time” becomes a dialogue between color and word, homeland and exile, past and the suspended present.
Within these walls, both artists converge to remind us that time is not merely measured in hours, but in moments of reflection, imagination, and art.
