At Aisha Alabbar Gallery in Dubai, from November 16, 2025, to January 7, 2026, the first solo exhibition by Salma Dib, titled Marks of Return, explores the wall not simply as a barrier but as a witness and archive. In her compositions, surfaces become places where silence is broken, memory accumulates, and resistance takes shape. Her works draw from the visual language of urban walls which, in contexts such as Palestine, absorb acts of testimony, turning concrete and stone into collective archives. Dib translates this reality into layered, scratched, and interrupted canvases that reflect both the fragility and the persistence of memory. Among the works on display is a monumental piece composed of twenty-five smaller elements assembled into a single whole, at once symbol and archive, a meditation on time, endurance, and the collective act of preserving memory. The wall thus becomes not merely a structure of separation but an active participant in the struggle for existence, dignity, and shared remembrance. Salma Dib’s works transform silent matter into a witness of her people’s persistence and the will for a future that refuses erasure.
