19 October - 15 December 2026Repair as a Practice of Seeing
Important : The physical exhibition is postpone until early 2027.
Important : The physical exhibition is postpone until early 2027.
NEW EXHIBITIONVenue: SAF House, Abdulaziz District, Mogadishu, Somalia
Repair as a Practice of Seeing is a group photography exhibition bringing together works by twelve artists across Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States.
The exhibition takes repair as both a theme and a method: a way of looking beyond what is broken, and towards the living practices of care, memory, renewal, survival and imagination that shape everyday life.
❋ What does repair mean ?Rather than treating repair as a final act of restoration, the exhibition understands it as an ongoing and unfinished process. Repair may appear through the rebuilding of place, the preservation of memory, the quiet labour of care, the reclamation of dignity, or the ways communities continue to live with rupture while imagining more generous futures.
❋ What is explored?Through documentary, conceptual, portraiture and archival photography, the participating artists examine how communities live with damage and care for what remains. Their works move through questions of spatial memory, family archives, domestic life, cultural continuity, displacement, land, identity, public space, grief and presence.
Featuring 12 artists, the exhibition explores themes of memory, identity, migration, belonging and the relationship between home, culture and collective histories.
Abdullahi Mohamud
Abdullahi is a Somali photographer whose practice is driven by observation. His work explores how light, colour, and time transform ordinary places into meaningful visual experiences.
Photographing changing cityscapes, architecture, and everyday moments, he is drawn to spaces that people often overlook. Rather than seeking spectacle, he finds beauty in subtle shifts of light, the rhythm of urban life, and the evolving character of familiar environments.
Believing that light gives life to every subject and colour gives emotion to every frame, Abdullahi uses photography to preserve moments that might otherwise disappear, inviting viewers to pause, look again, and discover the extraordinary within the everyday.
Daron Bandeira
Daron is a photographer and creative director based between Dubai and Berlin. Working across fashion, documentary, and visual storytelling, his practice explores memory, place, identity, and the emotional relationships people form with their environments.
His ongoing body of work, Stories of Near, brings together photographs made across Africa and beyond, reflecting on how landscapes, architecture, and everyday spaces continue to carry traces of history, movement, and belonging.
Moving fluidly between personal projects and commissioned work, Daron is interested in creating photographs that endure as cultural documents while maintaining a refined contemporary visual language. His work seeks to slow the act of looking, inviting viewers to engage with images through atmosphere, presence, and quiet observation.
Ethan Jacobs
Ethan is a Cape Town-based artist working across photography, film and moving image. His practice explores the intersections of art, politics, culture and social justice, with a particular interest in people, place, memory and the ways stories are constructed and represented.
Drawing from documentary and artistic approaches, his work often responds to contemporary social and political realities while exploring more personal and experimental forms of storytelling. He holds a BA in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town.
Jacobs’ practice is grounded in curiosity, collaboration and a commitment to creating work that engages critically with the world around him, while creating space for overlooked stories, perspectives and experiences.
Fatima Alaadin
Fatima is an independent documentary filmmaker, photographer, and researcher from South Lebanon. She holds a BA in Radio and Television from Al Maaref University and a BA in English Literature from the Lebanese University.
Her work is rooted in the lived experiences of South Lebanon and moves through memory, place, and the enduring relationship between people and land. Working across documentary film, photography, oral history, and archival research, she is particularly interested in how communities sustain belonging, negotiate displacement, and reconstruct meaning in the aftermath of war.
Her artistic practice is grounded in long-term observation and traces the quiet ways everyday life continues after rupture.
Gihad AbdElsamie
Gihad is an Egyptian documentary photographer and visual storyteller specializing in street photography, capturing daily life, traditional crafts, and cultural identity.
Her research-based projects explore memory, loss, and the emotional weight of personal belongings, investigating how objects carry traces of human experience beyond their physical existence. Blending formal documentary photography with conceptual collage techniques—incorporating elements like paper, handwritten archives, and inherited family items—she examines how tangible objects retain imprints of absence and presence over time.
Through her work, Gihad creates nuanced visual narratives where personal memory intersects with collective history.
Khadija Charif
Khadija is a visual artist and writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Born in Kenya and raised between Belgium and the United States, her work moves through the intersections of faith, migration, memory, and belonging. Drawing from her experiences as a Somali woman in the diaspora, she explores how identity is carried across generations, landscapes, and language.
Working across photography, writing, installation, and community-based practice, Khadija creates spaces where personal and collective histories meet. Her recent work reflects on the relationships between women in her family and within the wider Somali community, tracing the tenderness, resilience, and complexity of Black immigrant life.
Marie Le Moigne
After studying design and craft in France and graduating from the ERG in Brussels, Marie developed a multidisciplinary practice combining photography, writing and video.
Her work explores the boundaries between image and language, document and fiction. Focusing on the female body, often through self-portraiture, she creates intimate atmospheres in which photography becomes a space for transformation and the exploration of identity. Inspired by literature, she conceives her series as visual poems, situated at the intersection of body and landscape, between dream and reality.
In 2025, her work was exhibited at the IMPULSE Festival in Arles and at La Science de l’Art, in dialogue with philosopher Elsa Godart. In 2026, she was shortlisted for the Polyptyque Artist Book Prize, further affirming her ongoing research into the materiality of photographic images and artist books. Her work will also be exhibited at the INSIGHT Foto Festival in Varese, Italy, in autumn 2026.
Rahma Mohmoud
Rahma is a photographer and story documentation practitioner based in Hargeisa. Her creative practice focuses on personal, visual storytelling centered on domestic spaces, cultural memory, and everyday life in Somali society.
Her work explores women's private domestic routines, intergenerational continuity, and the subtle ways intimacy and tradition are preserved within the home.
Through quiet, observant imagery, her project My Somali Evening examines domestic preservation as a lived practice of visual and cultural repair.
Rajesh Dhar
Rajesh is an Indian visual artist, photographer and graphic designer based in Kolkata. A graduate of the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata his practice is rooted in an enduring fascination with the relationship between people, culture and place. Working primarily in documentary and street photography he explores the visual language of everyday life. His particular focus is on India's rural landscapes, traditional festivals and evolving social realities.
Dhar's photographs seek moments where the ordinary becomes extraordinary revealing the resilience, spirituality and shared humanity that shape collective life. Rather than simply documenting events he creates layered visual narratives that invite reflection on identity, community and the contrasts that define contemporary India. His images balance aesthetic sensitivity with social observation, offering an intimate perspective on both celebration and struggle.
His work has been exhibited and recognized internationally, and has appeared in several photography journals and publications, reflecting a practice committed to preserving the enduring spirit and cultural richness of India through honest and human-centered storytelling.
Ronesca Cloete
Ronesca is a multidisciplinary South African artist, based in Concordia, Namaqualand. She holds a degree in Creative Writing from the University of South Africa and has recently completed an Honours degree in Literary Theory. Her artistic practise, which includes photography and poetry, engages with the socio-ecological landscape of Namaqualand, exploring themes of land, memory, identity, and inherited histories.
Her multi-media work has featured in prominent group exhibitions in South Africa, including the expansive Diepe Grond/Deep Ground exhibition at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Festival (Oudsthoorn, 2025), Destruction, Resilience, Namaqualand at the Association for Visual Arts Gallery (Cape Town, 2024), and the Northern Cape Artists Exhibition at the William Humphreys Art Gallery (Kimberley, 2025).
Through photography and film essays Cloete investigates the legacies of colonial resource extraction on Namaqualand communities. Her poetry which addresses cultural identity has been published in the South African literary zine Ons Klyntji.
Ruan Cornelissen
Ruan is a documentary and street photographer from Cape Town, South Africa, with a background in theatre and a Masters’ in Intercultural Communication from the Shanghai Theatre Academy.
Ruan is currently a mentee at Through the Lens Collective. He was selected as one of GUP Magazine Fresh Eyes talent for 2026 - a global selection of emerging photographers who are pushing the boundaries of contemporary photography.
His current body of work titled “Your Spring Has Come” is a documentation of the Helderberg area in the Western Cape, and wrestles with notions of home, memory, culture and identity.
Wadah Omer
Wadah is a Sudanese photojournalist and documentary photographer based in Kampala, Uganda. His work focuses on using photography as a visual language to communicate complex social realities, including displacement, social unrest, spirituality, refugee life, and environmental issues. He believes that images can provide powerful context to both local and global challenges, and he uses photography as a tool to raise awareness and contribute to positive social change.
Wadah developed his photographic practice through self-teaching and independent documentary projects. He worked for two years with the Sudanese local newspaper Alhadatha, where he covered community events and human-interest stories, strengthening his understanding of how photos and visual narratives influence public opinion and collective memory.
Repair as a Practice of Seeing invites viewers to consider repair not as an endpoint, but as a practice: a way of attending to what has been fractured, caring for what remains, and imagining what can still be made possible.-
The exhibition will physically launch on 19 October 2026 at SAF House in Mogadishu, Somalia, creating a public space for audiences in the city to encounter the works and reflect on how photography can contribute to cultural repair without simplifying pain.
-
Repair a Practice of Seeing is an exhibition exploring repair as an ongoing process rather than a final act of restoration. Through photography and artistic practices, it examines how people and communities navigate damage, preserve memory and imagine new futures.
-
The exhibition engages with themes of memory, identity, displacement, belonging, domestic life, cultural continuity, grief and the relationship between people and place.
-
The exhibition brings together documentary, conceptual, portraiture and archival photography, offering different perspectives on how communities live with change, preserve histories and care for what remains.
-
The exhibition is presented by the Somali Arts Foundation (SAF), Somalia’s first contemporary art institution, which works to create an environment where the art can flourish in Somalia.