Muhammad Ali

Fracture Revealed (2026, Installation)

The installation Fracture Revealed builds on my investigation during the Art Inside Out residency Deams and Visions by the Sea exploring the traces of surrealism in contemporary art, in Halmstad 2024. I was interested in Grötviks quarry, a place that inspired the Halmstadgruppen artists and others. That research led to the mural drawing Beneath the Stone (2024) at Mjellby Konstmuseum, which explored hidden narratives in the landscape. The new work shifts focus from what lies beneath to what is trying to emerge. Through drawing, sculpture and animation, I explore fragments and unresolved stories caught in everyday life.

Stones lifted from the ground seem to float between objects and creatures, caught in the process of becoming. Figures with stone heads, blocked entrances, and winged outlines suggest changes that hesitate, stall, or stay unfinished. Animated parts repeat in short loops, giving life to forms, that try but fail to settle into fixed identities, as if something started to emerge but hardened before it could fully form.

Instead of uncovering a hidden truth beneath the surface, this work uses imagination to explore the contradictions of modern life, where different versions of reality exist, overlap, and stay unresolved.

– Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali is a Swedish-Syrian artist whose work is characerized by a cross-disciplinary approach, moving between video, installations, digital worlds, painting, and drawing to explore how and where meaning arises and is constructed. By blurring the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious, he focuses his attention on all facets of life.

https://www.mhd-ali.com/

The residency Dreams and Visions by the Sea (2024, Halmstad Municipality) explored the imprint of Surrealism on the contemporary era. What do its core ideas mean for contemporary art? What parallel realities emerge from today’s desire to challenge and transform society, conventions, and the limitations of the self?