APORIA

Thursday 27 November – Saturday 17 January 2026

Project Loop is pleased to present Aporia, a solo exhibition by our fourth resident artist Ramzi Mallat.

To encounter Ramzi Mallat’s Aporia is to enter into an uncertain terrain, where thought, matter and time converge in a state of irresoluteness. Following his residency at Project LOOP, Mallat transforms the philosophical concept of aporia into an artistic exploration. 

First used by Plato to describe the moment of profound doubt that follows questioning, the term aporia (from the Greek ἀπορία, meaning “without passage” or “no way through”) was later formalised by Aristotle as a method, a necessary obstruction through which knowledge advances. Centuries on, Jacques Derrida reimagined it as an unpassable threshold, the space where meaning falters and yet must still be faced: “we await one another at the limit of the possible.” (Aporias, Stanford University Press, 1993).

In Aporia, Mallat’s works resist both nostalgia and repair, they dwell instead in what the artist calls a ‘poetics of aftermath’: an aesthetics of instability that reflects the precarity of the times we live in. The artist’s practice evokes this aftermath as a living condition rather than a historical event, an impossibility one must inhabit. 

Bringing together sculptures, drawings and prints, the exhibition reflects on a world marked by instability. Mallat’s Adrift (2023), a Mediterranean fishing boat fitted with Levantine mandaloun windows, captures the tension of migration, where opportunity for some becomes danger for others. Through this hybrid form, the artist explores heritage, displacement, and the fragile line between safety and peril. The work stands as an ode to migrants, the anonymous and the unfamiliar, while offering a way to grasp the conflicting forces of the migrant crisis.

Sorrowful and Bellicose (2023), a hanging anchor composed of illegible Arabic text which visually merges the familiar and strange. A jute rope is adorned by copper dendrites in the shape of coral growths, suggesting a repeated submersion in bodies of water. These nautical references symbolise both physical and metaphorical journeys into the sinking unknown, bringing to the forefront themes of erasure, refuge, wreckage and the abyss.

Running through all these gestures is a profound diasporic tension: the question of whether to leave in search of a better future or stay rooted in the place of origin. The artist examines what is lost, what is preserved, and what is continuously re-negotiated when one lives in motion, caught between returning, remaining, or beginning again elsewhere. This emotional conflict is expressed through objects that invoke fragility, protection, and challenge fate.

The result is an exhibition that entwines kitsch tropes with heritage, personal narrative with collective history, and ancient artefacts with forced displacement. Aporia grapples with relentless discord, and enters an immersive narrative that navigates identity, movement, and belonging.