Aysha E Arar, « Shahrazad / شهرزاد », Paris

Sans titre is pleased to present _Shahrazad_ / شهرزاد, the second solo exhibition by Palestinian artist Aysha E Arar (b. 1993) at the gallery. Taking its title from the legendary storyteller of _One Thousand and One Nights_, the exhibition draws on the figure of Shahrazad, who escapes death by telling a new story each night. For Aysha E Arar, storytelling becomes an act of survival, a means of resisting violence and reclaiming one's destiny. Drawing from Palestinian folklore, mythology, poetry, and personal memories, the artist creates a universe inhabited by hybrid figures, suspended between the human, the animal, and the imaginary. Women, birds, horses, and fantastical creatures intertwine and transform, escaping fixed identities and conventional boundaries. As Anissa Touati and Mohamed Amer Meziane suggest in their essay on the artist, to be published in her forthcoming monograph by Mousse, her practice can be understood as an "amphibian art," moving between worlds and embracing metamorphosis as a condition of freedom. This fluidity unfolds across the monumental, unstretched fabrics presented in the exhibition. Bodies overlap and dissolve into one another, while flashes of red, yellow, and green emerge from predominantly charcoal-grey surfaces. Eyes, hands, and flowing hair become fragments of a visual language in which love, desire, fear, and violence coexist. Handwritten Arabic words and phrases run through these compositions, becoming an integral part of the images. Among them, شهرزاد (_Shahrazad_), الحب (_love_), and الحرب (_war_) echo the intertwined narratives of the works. Elsewhere, the storyteller declares: "My homeland is the land of freedom, the land of love and war." These inscriptions extend the gestures and movements of the figures, blurring the distinction between image and language. Rooted in the Palestinian experience, E Arar's practice embraces painting, drawing, poetry, and performance as interconnected forms of expression. Her fantastical world is not an escape from reality, but a way of reimagining it, preserving threatened memories while envisioning other possibilities. Like Shahrazad, who survives by inventing a new story each night, Aysha E Arar transforms storytelling into a space of resistance, where tenderness, imagination, and desire become powerful assertions of life and freedom.