Camden Art Centre – Zeinab Saleh: Softest place (on earth)

Zeinab Saleh (b. 1996, Nairobi, Kenya) is a London-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses painting, drawing and video. Finding inspiration in everyday experiences, music and VHS tapes of home video footage, Saleh’s work offers a glimpse into a past world and places personal histories at its core.

For her first solo exhibition, Saleh presents a new body of work made over the past year that meditates on the condition of stillness imposed by the pandemic. As layers of charcoal are removed from the canvases, forms and figures are revealed in the depth of field that lies behind masked areas. Conjured in muted colours and fluid lines and forms, Saleh’s subjects – which include apparently symbolic animals, from cats to snakes to swans, and the vegetal arabesques traced by leaves and tendrils – emerge like apparitions in the shrouded atmosphere of a dream or memory.