Encoded in Petals by Soraya Abu Naba'a Canvas Online Magazine

ENCODED IN PETALS | SORAYA ABU NABA'A

A cultured polymath and renowned figure of Syrian art, Asaad Arabi was a painter, art critic and theoretician. Although Arabi had been living in Paris since 1975, his birthplace of Damascus was a constant muse in his body of Artbooth Gallery presents Encoded in Petals, a solo exhibition by Soraya Abu Naba’a that brings together painting, textile installation, drawing, sculpture and spatial intervention.

Developed over several years, the exhibition reflects a sustained engagement with nature, memory, women’s labor and the transmission of ancestral knowledge. Flowers appear not as ornament, but as vessels through which histories of care, resilience and embodied intelligence are carriedforward.Informed by Abu Naba’a’s lived experience across the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe and the United States, the exhibition approaches identity as something shaped through movement, material and sensory memory. Her visual language draws from abstraction, traditional craft,digital aesthetics and ecological awareness. Colour, texture and form operate as systems of communication. Accumulated linework gives shape to petals, textiles unfold as terrains and craftfunctions as both archive and continuity.

Throughout the exhibition, flowers serve as both motif and conceptual framework. Drawing on floriography, the historical language of flowers, Abu Naba’a engages botanical forms as carriers of emotion, ancestral knowledge and ecological awareness. Living and working in Florida, where the effects of climate change are increasingly present, she turns to regional flora as metaphors for adaptation, vulnerability and persistence, themes that resonate across geographies.Landscape is approached not as backdrop, but as witness. Petals, stems and veins are abstracted into linear structures and chromatic fields that recall rivers, topographies and systems of exchange. Informed by principles of deep ecology, the work emphasises interdependence, suggesting that every pattern, colour and material choice holds significance. Flowers emerge not as passive objects of beauty, but as sources of knowledge, offering insight through form, cycleand fragility.
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