As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame
07.02.2026 – 31.05.2026
La Fabra Centre d’Art Contemporani
Barcelona
https://www.barcelona.cat/lafabracac/en/content/stones-their-palms-embers-and-flame
Marianne Fahmy, Joyce Joumaa, Huda Takriti, Hasan Özgür Top
Curated by Chiara Cartuccia
As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame (after Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan) explores the entanglement of ruination with histories of anticolonial resistance, uprising, revolution and political radicalism across the Mediterranean.
Ruins are not understood here as inert remnants of the past, but as charged terrains where capitulation and endurance meet; “negative commons” that, while bearing the traces of decay and dispossession, also harbour the promise of resurgence, inscribing a field of struggle where memory, imagination and desire intersect. Ruins are inseparable from the gestures that produced them and those that rise in their wake: acts of disobedience and steadfastness, carrying within them the dual fate of defeat and victory.
The exhibition brings together four artists whose work engages these conditions through distinct yet convergent strategies: addressing ruins as mnemonic sites and speculative devices, where remembrance sparks projections of futures beyond catastrophe; tracing cycles of social ruination in the light of revolutionary pasts and presents, exposing how collapse and germination fold into one another; interrogating archaeology and the archival as technologies of domination, disciplines that fabricate legitimacy, monumentalise defeat and erase insurgent memory. Ruin is seized as a terrain of confrontation, where violence is neither concealed nor disavowed, but recognised as integral to the generative force of political transformation. The exhibition’s lexicon also unsettles the figure of the “hero”, shifting the viewer’s attention toward collective gestures of defiance, sacrifice and repetition. Resistance is reframed not as a singular, continuous triumphal gesture, but as a recurring, obstinate rhythm—the persistence of bodies standing, falling and rising again.
As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame positions ruin as both wound and weapon, at once scar and arsenal. From this unstable ground, between dust and ignition, new solidarities and configurations of struggle erupt. In the interstices of destruction and creation, political imagination endures.
Marianne Fahmy (Alexandria, 1992) is an Egyptian artist based in Alexandria, whose work spans film and installation, re-examining history through its multilayered meanings to purpose new beginnings. Marianne’s practice is deeply connected to a delicate balance between fiction and reality. Her mixed media work seamlessly blends archival materials with her own fabricated imagery. Through recurring symbols, ranging from environmental concerns to the possibilities of a new nationalism within marginalised narratives, Fahmy interrogates the structures shaping the past, present and a possible future fate.
Her work has been shown at the Dakar Biennale (2018), the Havana Biennial (2019), the 7th Yokohama Trienniale (2020), Manifesta 13 (2020), MEDITERRANEA 19 Young Artists Biennale (2021), the Yapi Kredi Culture Centre in Istanbul (2022), the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (2022), Bozar in Brussels (2002 & 2023), the Sharjah Biennial (2023), the Biennale Gherdëina (2024), the GAMeC museum in Bergamo (2024) and MAXXI in Rome (2024).
Joyce Joumaa (Beirut, 1998) is a Lebanese Canadian visual artist and writer based between Beirut, Montreal and Amsterdam. Her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon, as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment. Central to her practice is an interest in the political charge inscribed in space and the social psychology that unfolds out of this tension.
She has exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, e-flux Screening Room in New York, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Biennale di Venezia and the 35th edition of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. She was the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists in 2024 and the 26th Baloise Art Prize awarded at Art Basel 2025. Joumaa has been appointed a 2025-2027 Vera List Center fellow.
Huda Takriti (Damascus, 1990) uses video and installation to question hidden histories within colonial and state archives. Her work analyses how systems of power define memory through a decolonial and feminist lens. She explores how historical narratives are constructed and produced, as well as the potential of fiction as a strategy to scrutinise archival gaps and destabilise hegemonic narratives.
Huda Takriti’s latest exhibitions include MQ Freiraum, Kunsthalle Wien, mumok, Kunstraum Lakeside, all in Austria and Škuc Gallery in Slovenia. She received the Kunsthalle Wien Prize in 2020, the Vordemberge-Gildewart Scholarship in 2022, the Camargo Fellowship in 2023 and the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2025.
Hasan Özgür Top (Ankara, 1987) is interested in how the relationships between image, mythology, ideology, identity and the concept of contract take shape in politics. He particularly focuses on the role of aesthetics, knowledge production, radicalisation, and militarisation in political narratives and identity construction.
Top received his BA and MFA degrees from the Painting Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Marmara University, in 2014 and 2019, respectively. In 2020, he received his MA from the Dutch Art Institute. He has facilitated Visual Production and Moving Image courses at a BA level in Istanbul and is currently a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Chiara Cartuccia is a curator, writer and researcher. Her ongoing long-term research enquires into the Mediterranean as an invented/inventive geography, focusing on the ramifications of practical Mediterraneanism(s) in Euro-Mediterranean contexts.
She is co-founder and director of the curatorial and editorial platform EX NUNC. She has held curatorial positions at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin) and Manifesta Biennial (Palermo/Amsterdam), for which she co-curated the Manifesta 12 Planetary Garden Public Programme (2018). She has curated exhibitions and discursive and performative programmes at The Showroom (London), Goldsmiths College (London), Goethe-Institut Bulgaria (Sofia), Venice International Performance Art Week, ICA-Sofia, TBA21 (Madrid), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), La Escocesa (Barcelona) among others. As visiting curator at UNIDEE – Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella, 2022-2024), she curated Neither on Land nor at Sea, a biennial research project that addresses the Mediterranean as an unrooted geography (a site of unstable negotiation and world-making), developed through residencies and public programming. Cartuccia (co-)edited Manifesta 12. The Planetary Garden Reader (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2018), Place Holder (BOZAR, 2022), Neither on Land nor at Sea. Catalogue (UNIDEE, 2024) and Holding Place (Viaindustriae, 2025), part of the international project Alexandria: (Re)Activating Common Urban Imaginaries. She contributes regularly to magazines, catalogues and independent publications. Since 2024, she has been a tutor at DAI Dutch Art Institute, as part of Archive Ensemble.