Aisha Alabbar Gallery is delighted to present What We Carry Becomes the Terrain, a solo exhibition by Bénédicte Gimonnet, featuring a new body of paintings, drawings, and textile works that reflect on landscape, cultural inheritance, and the ways our sense of self is shaped across places and time.
Shaped by a pivotal journey back to Peru, the exhibition marks a renewed engagement with the artist’s Peruvian roots and the landscapes that have long informed her practice. Rather than depicting the rainforest as a geographical reality, Gimonnet transforms it into a site of reckoning, where recollection, imagination and lived experience converge. Dense vegetation, vibrant colour, and shifting perspectives create psychological landscapes that are at once intimate and expansive.
For more than a decade, Gimonnet has developed immersive painted environments that blur the boundaries between landscape and interiority. In this exhibition, that visual language deepens through recurring architectural motifs. Windows, façades and thresholds emerge within lush vegetation, creating a dialogue between built structures and organic growth. These forms evoke the human impulse to define, contain and order, while the surrounding landscape continually resists fixed boundaries, holding in tension ideas of origin, transformation and multiplicity.
Textile forms a central thread throughout the exhibition. Fabrics sourced from Peru, France, and the UAE are interwoven with talli, bringing together materials that carry distinct histories and traditions of making. The seam becomes both scar and bridge, expressing connection while preserving difference. Through these works, Gimonnet positions making as an act of cultural assembly, where material itself becomes a record of movement, encounter and exchange.
The exhibition also introduces the Gran Eco series, in which places of personal significance become points where biography and geography intersect. Alongside these paintings, intimate ink drawings, accompanied by graphite annotations recording time and duration, foreground process as an essential element of the artist’s practice. Together, these works reveal how repeated gestures of making gradually construct meaning through persistence and accumulation.
Across painting, drawing and textile, What We Carry Becomes the Terrain considers landscape as something carried as much as inhabited. Rather than presenting belonging as something fixed or recovered, Gimonnet proposes it as something continually assembled through memory, material and lived experience, inviting viewers to reflect on the fragments of place that shape our understanding of home.
Press release from Aisha Alabbar Gallery
Image: Bénédicte Gimonnet. Echoes TO & OR. 2025. Screen prints on organza. 45 × 68 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Aisha Alabbar Gallery
