Exhibition P857 — Dahaleez Collective

P857. A number on a map, simply a number—no names. No faces. No sky. No breath. Just coordinates flattened into a square. Sand, once moving, once alive, pinned to a grid. A designation. A deletion. P857. Southern Rimal. “Rimal” — the Arabic word for sand.

Soft. Shifting, once, this sand held houses, not just dust homes with voices, balconies filled with herbs. Omar Mukhtar Street cut through like a memory of movement. And the sea — always the sea — breathing beside us. However, on October 10, 2023, that breath was taken. All at once. So many beloved still lie beneath the rubble. Uncounted. Unburied. Unspoken. Now, two years later, the sand holds only fragments of what we do not believe are gone, not without a goodbye. P857. It was never just a number, but they made it so—pixels on a screen.

Easier to bomb a pixel than a tree. Easier when the trees have no names. When the soil has no story, when the people become square-shaped data, did cartography evolve to shrink the world? To fold it into pieces that could disappear with a click? Was every line a prelude to disappearance? And so, in a world that fails to find meaning in abstract pixels, we create an exhibition. Not of what is, but of what we remember it was, and what still insists on simply being. We invite you into the spiral—not a gallery, not a room, but a collapsing of space and time. Step inside and listen: Did they really leave? When we pass, will memory follow? Should we have stayed, or should the ground have taken us too? Who are they? Who are we? What is normal, and did it ever truly live here? What does it mean to return? Can the death dream spiral hold no answers? Only echoes. The further in you go, the more time folds.
This distance between you and P857 is not just kilometres.

It is the space between meaning and disclosure. It is where memory turns into compound time, where decades overlap in a single breath.

We are not here to show you what you've seen, or to uncover what was buried with the noise, or to speak to those who may never answer; we are here to lend you our spot to watch the void.

[Co-produced with Galeria ZDB, P857 is part of the thematic cycle Exiles.]

Free admission.

Poster © Dahaleez Collective