Fridman Gallery is honored to present a group exhibition featuring three singular artists, Shiva Ahmadi, Yacine Fall and Fidelis Joseph, who mine the materiality of their respective media to investigate the human condition and our relationship to Earth.

The centerpiece of the show is Shiva Ahmadi’s stunning stop-motion animation Marooned composed of 5,600 hand-drawn watercolors. It depicts a group of figures digging large rocks from the ground and hauling them over a hill to construct a pathway in the ocean towards a marooned oil tanker. Menacing ghouls appear in greater and greater numbers and, just as the pathway is nearing completion, maliciously circumvent the creatures who constructed it, reaching the oil tanker and swiftly steering it beyond the frame.

The centerpiece of the show is Shiva Ahmadi’s stunning stop-motion animation Marooned composed of 5,600 hand-drawn watercolors. It depicts a group of figures digging large rocks from the ground and hauling them over a hill to construct a pathway in the ocean towards a marooned oil tanker. Menacing ghouls appear in greater and greater numbers and, just as the pathway is nearing completion, maliciously circumvent the creatures who constructed it, reaching the oil tanker and swiftly steering it beyond the frame.

Yacine Fall’s ceramics and horsehide sculptures, appearing before Ahmadi’s video projection, provide three-dimensional, materialized expression to the animated rocks and laboring bodies.

Fidelis Joseph’s large-scale oils return the artists’ transformation of natural materials to the two-dimensional plane, capturing the multiplicity of emotions that result from our existential struggle for survival in harmony with the material conditions that have shaped us.

Exhibition Programming

Thursday, November 21 • Opening Reception • 6 – 8pm

Friday, November 22 • Artist Talk • 6pm

About the Artists

Shiva Ahmad utilizes watercolor and animation, to draw attention to global issues such as migration, war, and brutality against marginalized peoples. Ahmadi moved to the United States from Iran in 1998 and received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005. She has had solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; and Asia Society in New York City. Ahmadi’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Ahmadi is a professor of art at the University of California Davis.

Yacine Fall is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist. Using natural materials, she investigates concepts of heritage, ritual, and function through performance, sculpture, painting and installation. Inspired by her Senegalese and Mauritanian heritage, her work and practice speak to the human body and its entangled relationship with labor, history, and faith. Fall received a BFA from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in 2019 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2024.

Fidelis Joseph’s paintings reflect a personal history marked by pain and love, including separation from his native village, the loss of his father at a young age, and his brother’s long service in the Nigerian army, fighting against Boko Haram. The distortion in his subject matter echoes the emotional interplay of familial pride and fear of loss. Joseph was a recent studio fellow at NXTHVN. In 2023, he earned his MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he won the Cranbrook Museum Purchase Prize. In 2017, he graduated with a BFA from the esteemed Zaria Art School in Nigeria, where he received the Artist of the Year award and co-created a mural displayed on campus.