Amale Freiha Khlat works across installation, print, sculpture, video and sound to interrogate the conditions under which we see — and choose not to. Her practice is fundamentally theatrical: it constructs stages, positions spectators, and repeatedly tests the fourth wall — that threshold between witness and participant, between complicity and reflection.
The screen is her central device. The Mousharabiah lattice that simultaneously reveals and conceals. The plane window that can never quite frame the fleeting Clouds. The folding panel that divides actor from audience. The printed surface where ornamental pattern and bomb cloud overprint one another until neither remains intact. In The Celestial Weave, arabesque medallions are progressively consumed by bomb clouds across fifteen linocut reductions, leaving only white paper — an erasure that is also an invitation to reconstruct what has been silenced. In The Archive of Silence, a folding screen, two empty chairs and a short play stage a confrontation between remembering and denial, set in a war museum preparing an exhibition sponsored by an arms manufacturer. The audience, caught in the doorway, becomes both witness and accomplice to forgetting.
Across her work, refugees, clouds, forests and carnival figures appear as choreographed presences. Staged, framed, overprinted, and at times erased. The question is never simply what we see, but what the act of looking costs us, what it conceals, and whether the fourth wall can ever truly hold.
Born in Lebanon and based in London, Freiha Khlat holds an MA with distinction from the Royal College of Art and a Master’s degree from Penninghen, Paris. Her work is held in the British Museum’s Contemporary and Modern Middle Eastern Collection, and has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2024 and 2025.