It Smells Like Freedom brings together three practices that approach freedom as a condition shaped from within, rather than declared outwardly. Across the works of Elie Burjeli, Mayak, and Jean-Marc Nahas, the exhibition unfolds through memory, psychological tension, and the complexity of human connection.

Burjeli’s work operates through introspection, where image becomes a site of internal dialogue, tracing fragments of personal and collective memory. In contrast, Mayak constructs networks of relationships, where figures and forms remain entangled, suggesting that freedom is never isolated, but negotiated through others.

Nahas introduces a more confrontational register. His raw, expressionist language, marked by the weight of war and displacement, disrupts any stable reading of liberation, grounding it instead in lived experience and unresolved trauma.

Rather than defining freedom, the exhibition exposes its contradictions. It emerges as something partial, unstable, and continuously contested, formed through tension between the self, the other, and the conditions that bind them.