ArtDayME: On 23 September 2026, Lawrie Shabibi opened The Butterfly’s Burden, a solo exhibition by Nada Elkalaawy. 

Borrowed from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the exhibition’s title speaks to the tension between sensitivity, beauty, and emotional weight. Across a body of paintings developed through layered processes of accumulation and erasure, Elkalaawy explores memory, loss, regeneration, and the passage of time. Ephemeral forms including flowers, butterflies, domestic vessels, family photographs, and ghostly figures hold traces of shared human experience, drifting between past and present, presence and absence.

The works in The Butterfly’s Burden emerged from Elkalaawy’s own experience of recent loss and grief, while also giving form to manifestations of hope. They are shaped by a series of dualities: foreground and background, familiarity and surreality, happiness and sadness, hope and despair, life and death. The narratives remain intentionally ambiguous and untethered from a specific place or moment, allowing fragments of personal experience to move towards broader reflections on human connection.

The exhibition runs until 7 November 2026.

Photos credit: Lawrie Shabibi