“The Sky Inside You” is a pair show between Eltayeb Dawelbait (Sudan) and Mostafa Sleem (Egypt), two artists who connect and draw inspiration from childhood memories of The Sahara Desert. Memories make us who we are.

The Desert: A place where dunes move and landmarks vanish. A landscape as fluid as water where distance loses meaning, time stretches to blurring horizons and the solidity of our vision turns to mirage. Chaotic. Wild. Continually changing. Never the same. The desert; where history buries itself and dreams are lost beneath the sands of time.

The Sky: Speckled with stars. Each one makes its nightly pilgrimage above the vast tides. Beacons in transit. Lights to guide us. And the moon, a witness. Incandescent with beauty. Eclipsing all else, even the furious burning of distant. The Arabs naturally looked to the order of the heavens to navigate the chaos of the dunes.

Eltayeb Dawelbait, the Night on the Desert

He remembers his father mysteriously navigating the desert with his eyes on the stars and the moon, a memory that tethers his imagination to the celestial spheres and still draws his eyes upwards. When reason is eclipsed, intuition ignites and a space for creativity opens. We follow the fleeting footprints of our ancestors with our gaze cast upwards to the moon for inspiration and guidance. For Eltayeb, the genderless moon is unreachable, standing in the heavens as an impossible dream. An embodiment of beauty with its wan, lunatic light and the mysterious power of its transit. The moon pulls at our souls as it reaches for the tides. In the desert we may lose ourselves but when the moon is shining we find our way home. The desert winds blow colours through time to Eltayeb’s waiting palette. Using discarded wood, windows, doors, kitchen drawers, sheets of rustic metal, he scrapes layer by layer as if searching for lost treasure, digging up buried lives and bringing forgotten creatures to light. In the sand, when ghostly memories stir, they evaporate into the sky to be resurrected by the artist as moons that remind us that life is a fragile moment and beauty is eternal.

Mostafa Sleem, the Mirage

He remembers a father surrounded by the devotional Sufi music, a spiritual practice that embraces harmony and rhythm as portals to the holy depths of the soul and facilitates a connection to the everything in all. When Mostafa looks to music he sees beauty and eternity. When I am in silence I fall into that place where everything is music. Rumi The face of a Mostafa painting is a tessellating mirage, an illusion of character caught between reality and dreams, torn between the rigour of stillness and the melody of time. Music cannot cease to move without ceasing to be. So too the soul. And art. Throughout his childhood Mostafa saw how his father would look to the desert to cleanse the bright waters of his soul, give chase to his deepening spirit and meet with the love that connects us all as one. In solitude his father would venture into the sands, led at first by the stars above and then by the guiding lights that ignite when we feed our inner spaces with the music of silence. We are stars wrapped in skin. The light you are seeking.