Exploring ritual, repetition, and ecological consciousness through practices rooted in care and process.
11 April 2026
Within ‘House of Galleries (Volume 11)’, the works of Niquu Eyeta and Ghizlane Sahli unfold as a quiet yet charged dialogue, shaped by material sensitivity, temporal depth, and an attunement to processes of transformation. Eyeta’s layered, organic compositions, shaped through ritual, memory, and responsiveness, encounter Sahli’s intricate alveolar structures, in which discarded matter is reanimated through repetition, care, and accumulation. Together, their works trace a shared commitment to material as a living archive, holding within it histories of movement, ecology, and embodied experience, while opening a space where fragility and resilience co-exist, and where meaning is continuously negotiated rather than resolved. ART AFRICA speaks to the artists about their work.
Ghizlane Sahli, Histoires de Tripes (Volume 006), 2019, Silk and plastic tubes on wire frame. Image courtesy of Sakhile&Me.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘ House of Galleries (Volume 11)’ brings distinct practices into a shared framework. How did you approach inhabiting this collective space, and what resonances or tensions emerged between your works?
Ghizlane Sahli: Within the collective framework of ‘House of Galleries,’ I approached the space as a field of dialogue rather than separation. My alveoli structures created a porous environment that invited circulation between works and viewers. In conversation with Niquu Eyeta’s practice, a subtle resonance emerged around care, memory, and transformation, while the tension between our different material languages opened a productive space for reflection on fragility and resilience.
Niquu Eyeta: I approach every space with curiosity as it becomes a new environment for my creations, entering into dialogue with its surroundings. As multiple positions are presented within a short period of time, inhabiting a space like this calls for a certain slowness in encountering that allows the works to unfold and support the perception of the layers and movements embedded into my practice. In this case, I noticed that Ghizlane’s practice and my own both emerge from an attunement to, and reflection on, the natural world and the ways humans move within it. This resonance in the perception of material as something that holds traces of time and transformation created a generative tension, as materials in Ghizlane’s works differed from the combination of discarded materials, and my choice to use organic components in my practice, such as plant pigments, clay, and other naturally derived materials.
Niquu Eyeta, Unnamed Kin, Cotton, plant and mineral pigment, oil pastel, pastel chalk, bookbinding glue and gum arabica, 2025. Image courtesy of Sakhile&Me.
Your practices treat material as a site of transformation. How does this shift within the temporality of an art fair context?
Ghizlane Sahli: My work is rooted in slow processes of collecting, assembling, and reanimating discarded materials. Within the accelerated temporality of an art fair, this slowness becomes more visible and almost resistant. It allows the material to carry another rhythm into the space. One that invites viewers to pause and reconsider value, time, and attention.
Niquu Eyeta: Elements of organic nature reassembled by my hands, the ingredients continue to live and transform as they are exposed to light and temperature. I do not seek to intervene in this process of immanence but rather co-create with them, engaging in an attentive call-and-response. They never settle into a final or fixed state; even after I step back from direct interaction, they remain porous and entangled with life’s natural processes of growth and decay, continuously becoming.
Ghizlane Sahli, Histoires de Tripes 077, 2019 Silk, plastic bottles and plastic tubes on wire frame and wooden plate. Image courtesy of Sakhile&Me.
Niquu, your work unfolds through slow, ritual processes. Ghizlane, your alveoli structures reanimate discarded matter. How do these temporalities of making speak to one another here?
Ghizlane Sahli: Although our processes differ, they share a sensitivity to transformation through repetition and care. My work develops through small alveoli structures made from discarded plastic embroidered with silk thread. Each element functions like a cell, the elementary unit of my practice, whose proliferation gradually creates the material itself, almost like skin. These alveoli grow through accumulation and reconstruction, while Niquu’s work unfolds through ritual gestures. Together, these temporalities create a quiet conversation about healing, memory, and the possibility of renewal through material practice.
Niquu Eyeta: In their refusal to arrive quickly at a state of “finishedness”, both works embrace process and care in the making. In Ghizlane’s practice, wrapping bottles with silk thread is a slow, meditative, and repetitive gesture.
For me, the slowness emerges through listening and responding to the materials, presences, memories, my movements, and my intention. I boil or ferment my dyes, allowing them the time they need. Then comes the dyeing, painting, mark-making part, alongside the layering and reassembly of textile; cutting, sewing and stitching while moving between transparency and opacity. These processes unfold as rituals, spiritual and sensual, rooted in an exchange and attunement in which my perception is not purely visual but also lived through my body, touch, rhythm, and responsiveness, allowing the work to emerge through an ongoing dialogue. Across both of our processes, there is a rhythm in which movement becomes a form of attention, a form of presence. Sensing time as being not something to be measured, but lived through, wrapping, layering and releasing.
Installation view. Image courtesy of Sakhile&Me.
The body, whether implied or abstracted, recurs in both practices. How does this exhibition reshape readings of corporeality and intimacy?
Ghizlane Sahli: In my work, the alveoli structures evoke cellular and organic systems connected to breathing, protection, and vulnerability, but they also relate strongly to femininity and to the intimate space of the female body. My practice explores the woman’s body not as something to represent but as something to celebrate, a space of sensitivity, strength, and interiority. Presented alongside Niquu Eyeta’s work, corporeality becomes less literal and more atmospheric, opening a shared reflection on intimacy as something embodied, protective, and deeply human.
Niquu Eyeta:The body within my work is rarely fully outlined; I think it’s sensed through the material itself, through layering, opacity, movement, and hints of familiar forms. There is no singular narrative within my works; bodies flow into one another, as relation and reflection, dissolving clear boundaries. Forms that echo the human, cartographic lines, and more-than-human presences shape and reshape each other. In their interaction, something new emerges that is not yet fully defined. Corporeality shifts away from the idea of a singular body into a field of intra-connected relationalities, where the sensing of continuities between different forms of life matters. Ghizlane’s forms may resemble organs, yet also something aquatic life, such as coral. This play between the internal and the environmental, the human and the more-than-human, opens an intimate space of exploration within both of our practices.
Ghizlane, your materials foreground craft and ecology; Niquu, yours carry traces of care and violence. How do these material ethics shift within the economies of the fair?
Ghizlane Sahli: Working with recycled textile waste is a way for me to question systems of production and consumption. Within the fair’s economy, these materials retain their critical presence, reminding us that value can emerge from what is overlooked. They introduce another narrative, one based on regeneration rather than extraction.
Niquu Eyeta: I work with memory, personal and collective, and each material that I choose to work with carries traces of stories embedded in cultural, historical, socio-political, spiritual, and mythical dimensions of our shared unique experience. As for my work, it calls for care, and it’s a responsibility one consciously chooses to take on. In this way, the works articulate a different sense of value, grounded in an ethics of care, in which attention and relation become integral to how the works are encountered and sustained.
Your works traverse multiple geographies. How do locality, migration, and transnational exchange inform your contributions to this platform?
Ghizlane Sahli: My practice is deeply connected to Morocco through material knowledge and craft traditions, but it also evolves through international exchanges and collaborations. Participating in this platform enabled me to situate these local references within a broader dialogue on movement, circulation, and shared ecological concerns across borders.
Niquu Eyeta: I think of geography as something carried within materials rather than tied to a single place. It travels, settles and shifts. Born and raised in Ethiopia and now living in Germany, I find myself moving within these spaces, where questions of identity are present and lived but are not contained. The pigments and textiles I work with carry their own stories. They are shaped by colonialism, extractivsm and capitalism. As they move through different hands and places, their meanings shift. In my works, these traces do not come into a single stable narrative but remain scattered and entangled. My work exists somewhere within these movements, always arriving but never fully arrived.
Installation view. Image courtesy of Sakhile&Me.
Both practices engage states of transition. What does it mean to stage these liminal conditions within a context oriented toward visibility and circulation?
Ghizlane Sahli: Staging transitional states in a highly visible context, such as an art fair, creates an interesting contrast. My work exists between waste and regeneration, fragility and structure. Bringing these liminal conditions into this space makes them visible as active processes rather than finished forms.
Niquu Eyeta: Liminality is inherently fugitive, and I feel like whenever we try to fix it, it slips even more. For me, the act of creating is always in transition, a reflection of how personal experience can be a point of entry into a collective space-body that is expansive and always in motion. The works ask us for a different kind of attention, and seeing that navigates between graspability and flight. Asking us to dwell in a space of tension with what can be held and what slips away, and to recognise that meaning itself is never fully fixed.
‘House of Galleries’ proposes a collaborative model. How do you navigate authorship and agency within this framework?
Ghizlane Sahli: I see collaboration as a way of expanding authorship rather than losing it. Working within the House of Galleries framework encouraged dialogue between artists, galleries, and audiences. It created a shared space in which individual practices remained distinct yet could resonate collectively through exchange and proximity.
Niquu Eyeta: Sakhile and Daniel’s curation, in bringing Ghizlane and me into this space, opens a field for a generative encounter that moves between visitors, curators, and the ways of the gallery and art fair. Authorship and agency are important, yet they are never singular or fully contained. In my works, agency emerges through layers of relation, material, and time, all shaped by multiple presences that exist alongside my own. The moment a work enters a collective space beyond the studio, the authorship ripples outward, shared to some extent by everyone who encounters and is transformed by it.
This exhibition took place at Sakhile&Me, Frankfurt am Main, from 22- 25 January 2026.
