Enter Art Fair: Copenhagen
Overview
Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd, From the Coast Line, a Visit, 2025
BOOTH 51
On the occasion of Enter Art Fair Copenhagen 2025, from August 28 to 31, Nil Gallery presents a group of artists whose practices transform memory into material and symbolic languages. Through ritual, abstraction, and deeply personal narratives, their works interrogate identity, challenge dominant visual traditions, and reclaim space for introspection, resistance, and healing.
Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd redefines Eurocentric painting by embedding Middle Eastern textiles and ritual purification into his canvases. His charcoal-stained, sage-dyed silk surfaces are tender yet transgressive, where identity, grief, and desire intersect. Infused with memory and symbolism, his male figures occupy a liminal space between personal history and collective experience, blurring sacredness and transgression with a language of resilience and transformation.
Gommaar Gilliams delves into emotion and nostalgia through dreamlike abstraction. His richly layered compositions, infused with mythological and symbolic motifs, invite viewers into lyrical, atmospheric realms where color and gesture become conduits for longing and memory.
Girma Berta presents a vibrant and contemporary vision of African urban life. His painterly photography captures the raw, kinetic energy of cities across the continent, honoring the movement, labor, and dignity of everyday existence. Through minimalist yet vivid compositions, Berta reflects the ongoing digital evolution of African visual storytelling.
Anaïs Maar constructs a visual universe of autobiography through hybrid figures and symbolic bestiaries. Her emotionally charged paintings—rich in color and myth—explore themes of femininity, transformation, and vulnerability. Drawing on influences that range from Fauvism to Japanese graphic culture, Maar fuses introspection and mythology into a visceral, poetic visual language.
Simon Buret’s mixed-media works blend abstraction with intimate reflection. Treating painting as a form of prayer—an introspective practice of emotional release and spiritual offering—he incorporates grease pencil, coffee grounds, and other materials to craft quiet yet richly textured meditations on the fragility and strength of the human condition. His pieces serve as contemplative offerings—gestures charged with emotion, memory, and resilience.
Philip Aguirre y Otegui anchors the presentation with socially engaged sculptures and works on paper exploring migration, displacement, and community. His practice seamlessly bridges poetic form and political consciousness, offering visual meditations on human dignity and collective experience.
Together, these artists weave a collective narrative of transformation—where the personal becomes social, and material becomes memory. Their practices open vital spaces for reimagining identity, reclaiming representation, and honoring the unseen layers of experience.
