52 x 60 in
CARBON 12 is delighted to return to Frieze London 2026 featuring works by Anthony Akinbola, Sarah Almehairi, Nour Malas and Amba Sayal-Bennett. Across their practices, each artist navigates material and structure as sites of inquiry, offering a certain introspection found within each approach. Beginning with a system - whether architectural, linguistic, contemplative or cultural - their work evolves through process, repetition, and intervention, arriving at frameworks that shape how meaning, identity, and space are formed.
Anthony Akinbola repurposes everyday objects to explore the intersections of material culture and socio-political histories. Carrying a multifaceted approach to medium and composition, he employs textiles, found objects, and repetition to investigate how commodities carry narratives of labor, power, and identity. Central to his practice is the durag, selected for both its material and cultural significance. His new series of works moves through a long history of floral and botanical paintings by translating the genre into fabric. The seams and folds allow the image to form through construction rather than illusion, while the durag’s cultural charge continues to circulate within the work. In his attempt to form the durag as a flower, he discovered a new form of abstraction specific to the material, drawn from the structure of classical floral still lifes, without explicitly alluding to it.
Emirati artist Sarah Almehairi engages space, structure, and abstraction as evolving systems. Her practice often begins with frameworks such as grids, frames, and measured forms, that are then folded, cut, and reconfigured through intuitive mark-making. Through her Off Centric & Off Centered series, surfaces have become sculptural, and negative space integral as it gains material presence, allowing absence to shape meaning as much as form. Structure is never fixed, but rather continually reflecting how environments are built, undone, and reimagined. The focus is also shifting into two main elements through the work. The first: how the line becomes something that is read and revisited within the composition, and how that changes the way that the work is encountered and perceived. The second: the new techniques that introduce different textures as a form itself, bringing out different materialities allowing for new connections to appear.
Amba Sayal-Bennett’s practice interrogates language, labor, and systems of power that examine how meaning is circulated and controlled, particularly within institutional, bureaucratic, or colonial frameworks. The translation between the drawing and digital aspects of her works recall the displacement of the body in anatomical imaging, where presence becomes a diagram, gesture becomes abstracted, and forms engage with the agency of materials and structures. Her sculptures abstract geometry from architectural layouts, combining industrial and organic materials to intesect between existing systems and the future. Her construction of spaces examines the structure and use of language, the role of materials, and the socio-political frameworks that shape them.
Syrian-Canadian artist Nour Malas turns to a more introspective perspective: holding, honoring, and communing with personal history and familial lineages as spaces in which possible realities may be lived. In speaking to how she continues to communicate with her grandmother through dreams, Malas suggests how paintings can be portals into parallel, spiritual worlds. Conjuring new spaces with pigment, she is compelled to create sites of care, where imagination and magic can exist. Her work is deeply involved in how the matrilineal relationships have formed her. Her relationship with her mom, her mom’s relationship with her own mom, and Nour’s relationship with her grandmother, and finally how they all intersect in exploring her own femininity.
