Between What Was and What’s Becoming: Aidha Badr’s “I’m Never Coming Back” at Firetti Contemporary

There’s something magnetic about honesty — especially when it’s uncomfortable. In I’m Never Coming Back, her new solo exhibition at Firetti Contemporary in collaboration with Hunna Art Gallery, Aidha Badr doesn’t perform emotion; she lets it sit, quietly, in the room.

Opened on September 19 in Dubai, the show feels like walking into someone’s private archive — fragments of thought, gestures of tenderness, and moments of reckoning stitched together in paint.

Brooklyn-born and Dubai-based, Badr has always explored intimacy — the messy kind, the one that lives between memory and self-discovery. But this time, the story hits closer to home. The artist turns her gaze inward, tracing her own evolution from daughter to mother, from observer to subject. The result is a collection of works that blur autobiography and mythology — as if she’s rewriting the language of womanhood in real time.

In this body of work, the artist’s tone has shifted. Her earlier pieces examined the mother figure from the outside — curious, questioning, sometimes rebellious. Now, as a mother herself, Badr turns the gaze inward. Her self-portraits — tight crops of the face, the shoulder, the hand — are both shield and revelation. She becomes a modern Madonna: serene, protective, and hauntingly distant.

Threaded through these works is a recurring symbol — the horse. At first glance, it’s a toy, fragile and dissected; later, it grows into something fully formed, proud, and self-assured. In I Am Not the Same and I Am Never Coming Back, a majestic horse towers over its toy counterpart — a poetic confrontation between the past self and the present one. The image feels like a reckoning, a reconciliation, a gentle reminder that change is not loss but evolution.

“It’s not about running or escaping anymore,” Badr says. “It’s about being present with whatever’s shifted, and finding a kind of freedom in that.”

There’s a silence that lingers through the exhibition — the quiet weight of becoming. “I’m Never Coming Back” is less about departure and more about arrival: into womanhood, into motherhood, into a self that no longer seeks to fit a shape but to expand beyond it.

In Dubai’s growing art scene, where identity and transformation are recurring themes, Aidha Badr’s work stands out for its restraint — its refusal to dramatize emotion. Instead, she paints the small ruptures of daily life, the inner dialogues we rarely articulate, and the delicate power of accepting change.

Exhibition Details

Title: I’m Never Coming Back
Artist: Aidha Badr
Venue: Firetti Contemporary, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Public Dates: September 19 – November 7, 2025
Opening Reception: September 18, 7:00–9:00 PM
In collaboration with: Hunna Art Gallery

For more information, visit @firetticontemporary and @hunna.art.

Cover: Self portrait with rose 2025. oil on canvas. 168x107