ASIA NOW 2025

With two large canvases on view, Agil Abdullayev continues an ongoing investigation into identity, intimacy, and the social and cultural frameworks that shape them. Since 2019, Abdullayev has developed a practice that draws upon personal experience while speaking to broader questions of gender, visibility, and belonging. His compositions balance figuration and abstraction, using fluid forms, bold colour, and an intentional withholding of detail to create open-ended spaces for reflection. Characters and settings remain deliberately indistinct, allowing viewers to project their own associations and memories. Through this interplay of clarity and ambiguity, Abdullayev reframes traditional narratives of masculinity and challenges taboos around alternative expressions of love and identity within conservative contexts.

Gazelli Art House also presents work by Nouf Aljowaysir, who was born in Saudi Arabia and relocated to the US at the age of 13. On view will be three prints from Ancestral Seeds, part of an ongoing project which was most recently featured in a major show at Jeu de Paume, Paris, together with a brand-new sculptural and video piece. Developed from her long-term Salaf (Ancestors) series, Aljowaysir interrogates colonial-era photographic archives and the biases embedded within machine learning tools. By erasing, reconfiguring, and reanimating figures drawn from historically prejudiced datasets, she transforms absence into a site of resistance. Her new work extends this research to images of African artefacts, and comprises wall-mounted terracotta-hued tablets with laser-etched imagery, accompanied by a short Generative AI video. Further works by Aljowaysir feature in the group exhibition Subject to Change at Gazelli Art House, London, this autumn.

Aida Mahmudova explores memory, displacement, and belonging through layered, tactile works that hover between presence and absence. At Asia NOW, the gallery presents recent mixed-media paintings and sculptures, continuing her inquiry into overlooked places, transitional spaces, and fragments of collective history. Employing materials such as polyurethane foam, clay, and cement, Mahmudova constructs psychological landscapes that bridge painting and objecthood. In addition to her practice as an artist, Mahmudova is the Founder of YARAT Contemporary Art Space in Baku, Azerbaijan, a significant cultural hub for the city and region.

Together, Abdullayev, Aljowaysir, and Mahmudova present distinct but resonant practices: one excavating memory and place through material and form, another confronting algorithmic systems and inherited biases in digital archives, and a third reframing narratives of identity and intimacy through painting. Their works foreground questions of belonging, erasure, and resilience — central themes within Gazelli Art House’s programme, bridging contemporary practice across regions and generations.