"Faces Catastrophe With Flowers": Sabri Sundos and the Body as Archive

On 2026-07-18, in a sun-bleached gallery in Portland, Oregon, Sabri Sundos opened a solo show built from hundreds of hours of handwork: paper petals cut one by one, a Bisphenol mobile split cleanly in two, and a wall covered in a single aluminium tone he would not let his assistants touch. The exhibition is small in scale and unblinking in ambition. It asks the viewer to read catastrophe the way a botanist reads a pressed specimen: flattened, preserved, and refusing to revert to growth.

Sundos is a Palestinian-American painter whose practice has long refused the easy image. "I am obsessed with autonomy and movement," he told Hyperallergic ahead of the Portland opening, and the quotation lands less like an artist statement than like a working brief. Autonomy, here, means building every petal by hand and pinning it, alone, in place. Movement means a sculpture that can be reconfigured by hand on the floor of the gallery, a body that doubles as both image and infrastructure.

A studio built around refusal

The Portland show reads as a kind of working ledger. Sundos made the hundreds of flowers himself, working from a palette he describes as controlled and austere. The flowers sit on a wall sized by him, painted by him, in a tone he mixed alone. Visitors do not see a performance of refusal; they see its residue. In a market where large-scale floral installations are often produced by assistants or by AI image prompts, the labour itself is the argument.

The mobile, bisected and bisectable, comes out of a different inheritance. It nods to Alexander Calder while inverting his temperament. Where Calder's mobiles drift with the room's ambient air and resolve into cheerful balance, Sundos's piece hangs inert until a viewer tilts it. A painting that needs to be shaken becomes a painting that asks the viewer to take responsibility for its balance. The flowers, by contrast, refuse movement. Each one is pinned.

Palestine in the work, without a flag

Hyperallergic frames the show as a continuation of Sundos's project of translating inherited catastrophe into formal objects rather than slogans. The catalogue language avoids naming the war in the Middle East directly; the work avoids it more loudly. Flowers are cut from paper, not arranged from nature. Petals are uniform and mass-produced in appearance, yet each is individual. The politics of the show are carried in the gesture, not in a programme.

This is a deliberate choice, and it has costs. Western gallery audiences accustomed to contemporary work that performs its politics in plain text may read the florals as decorative. Critics closer to the Palestinian diaspora may read them as evasion. Sundos's argument, plainly stated, is that a flower pinned to a wall can hold more refusal than a slogan pinned to a placard. Whether that argument survives the room depends on who walks through.

The structure underneath the petals

The deeper structural claim is older than this show: that abstraction in late-empire America is never neutral, and that the choice to paint a petal rather than a person is itself a political act of triage. What does an inherited catastrophe look like when you refuse to depict its victims? It looks like this: a wall of pinned flowers in a colour the artist will not name for you, a brass mobile that stops working unless a stranger touches it, and a body, his own, that disappears into the labour and reappears only as a maker's mark.

There is a tension in the framing worth naming. A show that insists on autonomy, on refusing the readymade supply chain of attention, is also a show that runs on the institutional supply chain of biennial-scale attention: gallery press, gallery hours, gallery photography by Samantha Jensen. Sundos knows this. The Bisphenol mobile is the most honest object in the room precisely because it admits it cannot stand on its own.

What to watch

The Portland exhibition is the kind of show that travels by word of mouth, not by catalogue. Two practical beats follow. First, the painting-bench installation on view was assembled entirely by the artist across an unspecified but reportedly gruelling build period; the durability of paper petals in a public-facing room is a live question and the gallery's conservation notes will be a document worth reading when they appear. Second, Sundos is in a productive stretch and shows like this tend to attract institutional invitations from European biennials faster than they attract domestic press. The work itself, predictably, will outlive both.

The quiet wager of the room is that a viewer who enters already convinced of what a political painting should look like will leave having been moved, against expectation, by a pinned flower. That is a small thing to ask of an exhibition. It is also the only thing worth asking.

This article approaches the show from the artist's stated language and the gallery's published materials, in keeping with Monexus's practice of citing makers on their own terms before secondary commentary.