Can I Huge All These Flowers,
Onomatopee, Eindhoven
7 February – 10 May 2026

Onomatopee is delighted to present the first two-person exhibition of Ala Younis and Ali Eyal, titled “Can I Hug All These Flowers?” The exhibition focuses on the artists’ shared explorations of what history leaves behind: fragments, ghosts, and tangled narratives. Through works that interweave personal and collective experiences, Younis and Eyal expose the erosion of families, museums, and ideologies. They examine the traces left by politically charged events in the Arab World, creating spaces for affective solidarities.

The title evokes a memory from Eyal’s childhood in Baghdad: “I was addicted to rose petals during the sanctions. I used to eat a lot of flowers in the 1990s.” It also resonates with Younis’s exploration of the cut flowers that disappeared from Jordanian markets during the same period, revealing how they were tied to a market reconditioning led by the Dutch flower industry. Both artists weave their stories in and around the architecture that emerged from the dismemberment of Iraq under UN sanctions and the subsequent US-led invasion.

While Eyal delves into personal memories and lived experiences through sometimes absurd details in painting, drawing, and film that reconstruct situations in which roles shift fluidly among people, objects, spaces, and historical truths, Younis engages with female perspectives on histories of planning and performative presentations of state power. From infrastructures to modernist ideals, political regimes, and the afterlives of war, she studies expressions captured in ephemera that circulated across the Arab region in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including children’s publications.

Can I Hug All These Flowers? is curated by Silvia Franceschini and is the third exhibition in the five-year program Systems and Territories. The program focuses on monographic and thematic exhibitions, which stem from long-term investigations and collaborations between artists, researchers, and communities critically examining the categories, structures and ideologies upholding global modernity.

Photos by Nick Bookelaar