Ala Younis, Ali Eyal: Can I Hug All These Flowers?

Onomatopee is delighted to present the first two-person exhibition of Ala Younis and Ali Eyal, titled Can I Hug All These Flowers?. The exhibition focuses on the artists’ shared explorations of what history leaves behind: fragments, ghosts, and tangled narratives. Through works that interweave personal and collective experiences, Younis and Eyal expose the erosion of families, museums, and ideologies. They examine the traces left by politically charged events in the Arab World, creating spaces for affective solidarities.

The title evokes a memory from Eyal’s childhood in Baghdad: “I was addicted to rose petals during the sanctions. I used to eat a lot of flowers in the 1990s.” It also resonates with Younis’s exploration of the cut flowers that disappeared from Jordanian markets during the same period, revealing how they were tied to a market reconditioning led by the Dutch flower industry. Both artists weave their stories in and around the architecture that emerged from the dismemberment of Iraq under UN sanctions and the subsequent US-led invasion.

While Eyal delves into personal memories and lived experiences through sometimes absurd details in painting, drawing, and film that reconstruct situations in which roles shift fluidly among people, objects, spaces, and historical truths, Younis engages with female perspectives on histories of planning and performative presentations of state power. From infrastructures to modernist ideals, political regimes, and the afterlives of war, she studies expressions captured in ephemera that circulated across the Arab region in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including children’s publications.

Can I Hug All These Flowers? is curated by Silvia Franceschini and is the third exhibition in the five-year program Systems and Territories. The program focuses on monographic and thematic exhibitions, which stem from long-term investigations and collaborations between artists, researchers, and communities critically examining the categories, structures and ideologies upholding global modernity.

Ala Younis is a visual artist and curator based in Amman, Jordan. Her archival installations, textiles, drawings, and books forge subtle yet startling connections across political, social, urban, and popular imaginaries. Informed by her training in architecture and visual cultures, Younis’s projects focus on the physical transformations and narrative intersections of the Arab geographies in which she grew up. Her work embraces multiple protagonists and histories, countering dominant storylines. Across her investigations, oil politics, war, heritage, modernism, nationalism, and internationalism intersect.
Younis has participated in the biennials of Dhaka, Istanbul, Venice, Gwangju, Ural, Orléans, Ljubljana, Kaunas, Sharjah, the Islamic Arts in Jeddah, as well as the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. She co-founded the independent publishing initiative, Kayfa ta, which researches and publishes on and through independent endeavors. Younis holds a BSc in Architecture from the University of Jordan (1997), an MRes in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London (2016), and is currently reading for a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Ali Eyal is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Los Angeles. His practice spans drawing, painting, assemblage, and film, and employs imagination and storytelling to denounce the hardships posed by war and occupation. Tapping into the power of fiction, he crafts narratives depicting characters striving to overcome the challenges of their land, serving as allegories for resistance. Eyal weaves together elusive fragments and shards—personal memories, dreams, nightmares—assembling them into a disfigured whole which becomes a commentary on the impossibility of (coherent) narrative in the face of ongoing chaos and destruction. Eyal is part of the Whitney Biennial 2026, New York. His recent solo exhibitions include Imagine, all this happened just an hour ago, François Ghebaly New York (2025); Let Them Say Something, ChertLüdde, Berlin (2025). His group exhibitions include: the 14th Mercosul Biennial (2025); the 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2025); Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023); Is It Morning for You Yet?, 58th Carnegie International (2023); Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine, Chicago Cultural Center (2023); documenta 15, Kassel (2022); and Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, MoMA PS1 (2020). Eyal studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad (2015), was resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam (2020), and the Home Workspace Independent Study Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2016–17).