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Introduction, by Róisín Tapponi

In her first UK solo exhibition, Nada Elkalaawy uses painting to visualise a dialogue between dolls, statues and women. Rooted in a formal preoccupation with figuration, Cabinet of Curiosities alludes to the collecting of objects. These objects appear in Elkalaawy’s paintings as human and non-human, living and non-living.

This exhibition itself is representative of Elkalaawy’s own cabinet of curiosities; a partly real and mostly fictitious microcosm of histories, a collection of ideas, an archive of images and narratives extracted from memories. The relations …