Firetti Contemporary in Dubai, in collaboration with Hunna Art Gallery, presents I’m Never Coming Back, the new solo exhibition by Egyptian-American artist Aidha Badr. Through a suffused and poetic visual language, Badr explores the moment when motherhood erupts into life as a silent transformation, capable of redefining the deepest identity. Motherhood, evoked without fanfare, alters rhythms, habits, even the most minute thoughts, carefully rearranging parts of the self that now appear subtly different. This metamorphosis unfolds in a liminal space between who the daughter was and who the mother is becoming. Her canvases unfold like diary entries: fragile, raw, emotionally exposed, capturing the disorientation of a silent dissolution and the re-creation of what is still in the making. Badr’s previous practice focused on the emotional weight of the mother-daughter relationship, observed from a distance charged with memory. Now, having become a mother, the artist reverses her gaze. Her figures emerge with a more embodied presence and a more urgent pictorial language, focused on the immediacy of the present rather than the past. A new motif recurs in the series: the horse. It becomes not a symbol of escape, but of silent and graceful acceptance. Sometimes portrayed in its full form, at other times fragile as a toy, the horse embodies a state of suspension, between impulse and control. The most iconic works, such as I Am Not the Same and I Am Never Coming Back, show an adult horse alongside a toy version, evoking the acceptance of change and the reconciliation of new and past selves. The paintings are punctuated by handwritten fragments: Stay with me a little longer, I’m not the same and I’m never coming back, which sound not like declarations, but rather like the echo of an internal dialogue that refuses clear-cut conclusions. The portraits, composed in a fragmented and compressed way, withhold rather than invite intimacy, placing the viewer in a limbo between closeness and distance, desire and presence. At the heart of the exhibition is a meditation on the female psyche and the layered voices of femininity: the young daughter, curious and sensitive, and her mother, silent and protective. Not two separate entities, but an evolving blend, sometimes conflicted, sometimes harmonious, writing the fragile and irresolvable story of becoming. In this exhibition, Badr looks to the future, imagining that one day her daughter, encountering these works again, might perceive the profound love flowing through the folds of her mother's transformation - a change that has forever transformed her way of seeing herself and the world.
