Nothing New Under The Sun? Keemar's devastating and luminous debut solo show at Saan1 proves that art still has the power to make us see each other properly.
There is a painting in Keemar's exhibition nnuts that stops you in your tracks before you are ready for it. Against a field of saturated, pressing red, a face looks out at you. Not through you. Not past you. Directly, specifically, at you. The eyes are wide and white. The mouth is open in that charged space between speech and silence. The surface of the canvas is raw and fought-over, layered in fractured planes of turquoise, ochre, and ash, skin rendered not as a smooth continuum but as something assembled, renegotiated, and held together by sheer will. It is called Impossible Journey II, and if you stand in front of it for long enough, you will understand why this exhibition is already being talked about as one of the most significant shows to open in Manchester this year. 🔴
Built From Testimony
Keemar, the artist and curator behind nnuts (an acronym for "Nothing New Under The Sun"), has spent years listening. Listening to people who have moved across borders, through mountains, over seas, and through the grinding machinery of bureaucracy and state power. nnuts is not a show made from a distance. It is built from testimony, from trust, and from a sustained act of artistic attention that is, frankly, rare.
The exhibition unfolds across five sections, each carrying its own emotional register. It opens with movement and uncertainty, the push-and-pull forces that compel migration, and closes with a meditation on belonging. Between these poles, Keemar has constructed a world in paint, charcoal, collage, sculpture, and found materials that is by turns raw, tender, furious, and profoundly humane.
The Impossible Journey Portraits
The three large paintings that form the Impossible Journey series are the beating heart of the show. Each portrait is set against a different ground: grey, red, and black respectively, and each one operates as an entirely distinct emotional universe. The grey-grounded portrait hums with vigilance, its thick impasto suggesting memory compacted over time, the dark beard and luminous gaze creating a tension between concealment and visibility that mirrors, precisely, the political paradox migrants so often inhabit: hyper-visible as subjects of debate, invisible as individuals. The black-ground work is perhaps the most conceptually daring of the three: Keemar has painted directly over a printed pastoral European landscape, a scene of idyllic, ordered calm, burying it beneath urgent, gestural marks. Eyes ringed in electric blue confront you through the paint. The face does not sit gently on the landscape. It presses into it. It insists. The message could not be clearer: landscapes are never neutral, and Europe's pastoral self-image has always depended on deciding who belongs within it and who does not. 🖼️
Language as Violence: Precarious Life and the Sculptural Works
Away from the paintings, the sculptural and mixed-media works demonstrate the full range of Keemar's formal intelligence. Precarious Life is a hanging structure of branch, paper, paint, raffia, and fibre built around the torn pages of an old dictionary. Words like asylum, refugee, impossible, and migrate are interrupted by vertical red strokes that cut across them like borders drawn in ink and enforced in blood. Gold threads through the text like fragile illumination. Green wax-like seals punctuate the paper as bureaucratic stamps. It is a genuinely beautiful and genuinely disturbing object, one that exposes language itself as an architecture of power. Keemar describes the white raffia at the centre of the piece as representing surrender, not as defeat, but as the continuous relinquishment of self that forced migration demands. The structure hangs. It endures. It breathes in the air of the room.
Love Under Threat: Man from Iran
The Man from Iran collage tells the story of a 30-year-old man who left Iran in 2023 because loving another man could have cost him his life. He arrived in the United Kingdom on a small boat on the day Queen Elizabeth II died. The country was mourning a monarch; he was mourning a life. This work asks for recognition, not pity, as Keemar notes in the accompanying text, and it gets it. The protruding forms, the layered imagery, the shadows and overlapping textures speak of a journey across landscapes and emotional states simultaneously: fear, endurance, grief, hope. Nothing here is tidy because exile is not tidy.
The Body as Battleground: The Text of the Body
Equally arresting are the large charcoal and oil pastel works on paper that form The Text of the Body. Words emerge and collapse across the surface simultaneously: no, home, go, flee, move, belong. Written, crossed through, rewritten. The repeated no gathers unbearable weight. Not only as refusal but as experience: denied entry, denied safety, denied recognition. The persistence of the writing is itself an act of resistance. A refusal to disappear.
A Coil of Wire, a Name, a Life: Omid
And then there is Omid. A single coil of wire placed in a black box. A quiet space of remembrance for a man who died travelling through Greece, who fell behind the group he was moving with and never reached his destination. His name, in Persian, means hope. The work pauses the exhibition entirely. It asks you to stop, and to acknowledge the real human cost behind migration routes that we so often discuss as policy abstractions. In Persian culture, when someone dies, people say "روحش شاد": may his soul be joyful. In the context of this exhibition, in this room, surrounded by these portraits and these torn words and these layered collages of survival, it is the most quietly devastating thing you will encounter. 🕊️
An Act of Curatorial Ethics
What Keemar has achieved with nnuts is something that goes beyond craft, though the craft is considerable. It is an act of curatorial ethics as much as artistic expression. To curate is to select, to frame, to give space. In a world where borders constrict and definitions confine, nnuts performs another kind of curation entirely: one that loosens, questions, and reimagines what it means to make space for another human being.
The exhibition ends with a statement of thanks to all those who shared their stories with the artist. It is a short text, simply written, but it lands like a fist to the chest. "Each story carried weight and dignity," Keemar writes. "Each voice reminded me that migration is not an abstract idea, but a deeply human experience filled with love, loss, and hope."
Go. Go now. Take someone you love, or someone you disagree with, or both. Stand in front of Impossible Journey II and let the face look back at you. You will leave changed.
Saan1
🖼️ nnuts by Keemar
📅 Showing 3rd to 7th June, 1-6pm
📍 Saan1 5 Kelvin Street Manchester M4 1ET
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