Elza Kayal Gallery is proud to present “Pasts and Futures,” a contemporary group exhibition featuring the works of nine emerging artists from both local and international contexts. The exhibition interrogates the cyclical relationship between past, present, and future through the lens of memory, cultural inheritance, and speculative imagination. “Pasts and Futures” is curated by Ray Atlas, a student of Visual Arts and Anthropology at Barnard College of Columbia University.

“Pasts and Futures: Memory, Tradition, and the Art of Reimagining” presents a diverse set of practices grounded in a dialogue with historical narratives and traditions not as static conventions, but as frameworks for growth, healing, introspection, and connection. The featured artists, including Andrea Carola Robles Morales, Ashley Rapp, Beatrix Villiers, Em Bennett, Kyra Joy, Manuel Hernandez, Noah Boulton, Ray Atlas, and Shareef Sarhan, reinterpret art forms and intergenerational narratives through a contemporary lens, inviting audiences to imagine futures grounded in remembrance and cultural resilience. Together, their artworks ask: How do the legacies we inherit inform the societies we shape? How can revisiting traditions be an act of subversion or healing? And in a world grappling with ecological, political, and social uncertainty, how might memory itself serve as a guide for collective imagining?

By positioning these works, alongside others, within both historical and futuristic contexts, the exhibition will explore how art becomes a vessel for ethical reflection, cultural preservation, radical reinvention, and future-world building.