All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset

All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset—a phrase attributed to the ancient Mesopotamian king Sargon of Akkad—invokes one of the earliest claims to total dominion. Taking this assertion as both point of departure and provocation, the exhibition brings together works by Alla Abdunabi, Fatma Al Ali, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, and Michael Rakowitz to examine the persistence of imperial logics across time—through language, image, material, and myth.

If the 20th century was shaped by the rise of the nation-state, the present moment is increasingly defined by the return—or exposure—of imperial structures: extractive economies, contested geographies, and the symbolic afterlives of domination. Rather than presenting empire as a concluded historical form, the exhibition treats it as an ongoing condition—one that mutates, rebrands, and embeds itself in contemporary visual culture.

Across the exhibition, acts of naming, erasure, reconstruction, and repetition emerge as central gestures. A gulf is renamed; an artifact is rebuilt; a coin circulates; a lion persists only as symbol. These works do not attempt to stabilize history, but dwell in its distortions, where fragility and power remain entangled.

Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset (2018), of which the exhibition takes its title, traces the longue durée of imperial ambition through vividly colored, text-based collages. Constructed from fragments of commercial typography layered onto digitally sourced imagery, the works echo the visual language of advertising and networked communication—hashtags, email addresses, slogans—while invoking ancient imperial claims to total dominion. In parallel, his altered cartographic works enact minimal yet charged interventions: the partial erasure of a contested maritime name into an ambiguous fragment, or the masking of geopolitical nomenclature with spices sourced from historic trade routes. These gestures compress centuries of conflict, commerce, and rebranding into deceptively simple compositions, where humor and critique operate in tandem.

Fatma Al Ali’s Once Upon a Pirate Coast revisits the British campaign against the Qawasim fleet in 1809, reframing colonial archival imagery through acts of narrative reclamation. In Of Ships, Sails, and Misguided Labels (2024), early 19th-century prints are overlaid with typewritten text that adopts the voice of the land itself—an enduring witness to violence, transformation, and misrepresentation. This displacement of authorship unsettles the authority of colonial documentation. In the accompanying audio work, I Picked Up a Coin and Heard a Whisper (2024), visitors encounter a field of replicated currency within which a disembodied voice recounts the gradual disappearance of local monetary systems under imperial control. Circulation—of goods, images, and stories—becomes a subtle site of power.

Michael Rakowitz’s ongoing project, The invisible enemy should not exist, reconstructs artifacts stolen from the National Museum of Iraq following the 2003 invasion, referencing treasures from the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud. His meticulous reconstructions, crafted from Middle Eastern food packaging and Arabic-language newspapers, operate as both surrogate and critique—revealing how empires, ancient and modern, use cultural objects as instruments of power, legitimacy, and propaganda. By situating these artifacts within diasporic and global contexts, the work exposes the persistence of imperial influence over time, showing how histories and symbols are appropriated, displaced, and circulated to reinforce authority.

Alla Abdunabi’s works examine the afterlives of empire through the figure of the Barbary lion—an animal driven to extinction through colonial hunting, yet preserved as a symbol of imperial authority. In Foreign Bodies I (2025), Abdunabi draws on Eugène Delacroix’s depictions of lions, reworking these painterly representations through her own visual language. By revisiting canonical images, the work reflects on the circulation of the lion as both subject and symbol within art history and imperial imagination. Her large-scale reliefs, taste sweet, taste bitter (2024), draw on the instrumentalization of Roman ruins during Italian colonial rule in Libya, where restoration functioned as propaganda. The works mimic architectural ornamentation through labor-intensive processes that deliberately expose their construction, unsettling the illusion of permanence and beauty historically associated with empire.

Across these practices, the exhibition resists singular narratives. Instead, it stages overlapping temporalities in which ancient empires, colonial enterprises, and contemporary geopolitical formations mirror and refract one another. Humor, material transformation, and narrative disruption emerge as strategies for confronting systems that often present themselves as inevitable or immutable.

What emerges is not a fixed account of empire, but a shifting field of relations—where naming becomes an act of power, absence carries as much weight as presence, and histories persist not as distant pasts, but as active forces shaping the present. Rather than offering resolution, the exhibition invites sustained attention to the ways power endures, adapts, and continues to structure how the world is seen, remembered, and lived.