YASSIN ART GALLERY Cordially invites you to the opening of AHMED ALBAHRANI “The Sparrow… What Remains” OPENING RECEPTION Monday, 12 October 2026 6:00 PM YASSIN Art Gallery 159 C, “Baehler’s Mansions” 26th of July Street, Behind Diwan Bookstore Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt ──────── “The Sparrow… What Remains” By Ahmed Albahrani The Sparrow… What Remains is an exhibition of birds whose underlying narrative unfolds through the materials from which they are made: reclaimed wood, bronze, silkscreen prints, textiles and, unexpectedly, LEGO bricks. Each medium possesses a distinct nature, history and language. Yet, in the artist’s hands, these intrinsic qualities gradually yield to the image of a bird—and to the possibilities, memories and meanings it evokes. Reclaimed wood speaks most eloquently. Salvaged from ships dismantled in India, it retains the traces of salt, distant voyages and the passage of time. Albahrani is deeply attuned to its presence. “That wood was never silent to me. It breathed,” he reflects. It carried, in his words, “the stories of the people who had crossed it, their joy, their exhaustion, their absences, their waiting.” We often encounter an object most fully as itself only after it has ceased to serve its original purpose. Wood from ships that have “lost their purpose” enters such a moment of suspension: freed, briefly, from its former function, it remains a witness to lives and journeys beyond the artist’s own. Yet this interval is fleeting. In the painted wooden birds, the wood’s former identity is already transformed. Panels of orange, turquoise, ochre and black fit together across each body like fragments of a patchwork, while the grain of the salvaged timber emerges only where the pigment has worn away. What remains is neither simply the material’s past nor merely its new form, but a meeting of the two—a surface where memory, transformation and renewed purpose coexist. Through these varied materials, Albahrani invites us to consider what survives when a former life has ended, what is carried forward, and what new forms of meaning can emerge from what remains.
