House of Nisaba

The House of Nisaba

The year is 3100 BCE and writing is invented in ancient Mesopotamia. At first, to count the grain for trading at the market; then to capture human life and imagination in myths, hymns and parables, as language inscribed on clay tablets. The goddess Nisaba presides over this moment when knowledge itself starts to shift, as thousands of years of storytelling begin to take material form. She cannot write herself but speaks through others.

New Languages of Painting

The year is 2026 and knowledge is changing once again. Information circulates at an unprecedented pace and narratives about ourselves, our communities, and the world at large are becoming increasingly unstable. In this moment, we evoke Nisaba as a new generation of painters emerges. The artists in “House of Nisaba” are not part of a movement but share a similar approach: they paint allegorically.

In painting, allegory is a way of creating images or figures that express meaning beyond what they literally show, for instance how a human skull in historical still-life painting symbolises the impermanent nature of human achievement in the face of mortality.

The artists in “House of Nisaba” render new pictorial languages that draw as much from art history, mythology and literature, as from fashion, cinema, news media, science fiction, astrology, and digital platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Information becomes algorithmic, the feed starts to matter. Rather than offering stable narratives, these paintings propose worlds shaped by discontinuity, ambiguity, and multiplicity.

Allegory in Contemporary Painting

In painting from previous centuries, allegorical meaning was legible to almost all viewers. There was a shared iconography, a shared system of symbols through which visual meaning was produced and recognised.

Today, the production of meaning is largely situated within each artist’s own practice. A shared iconography has made way for a more individualised structure of references: citations and appropriations that reflect the broad circulation and fragmentation of information distribution.

So how is life – experiences, perspectives, stories – narrated by the artists in “House of Nisaba”? How do they tell, speculate, fabulate, roleplay in their work? How do they create their own worlds, cosmologies and storylines?

The Architecture of the House

Devised by the design and architecture studio Formafantasma, the exhibition’s architecture suggests this House as provisional and always in the making, reflecting the new life of painting in the 21st century.

The exhibition plays with the architectural history of allegorical painting in temples, churches, cathedrals and mosques, by including aspects of sacred architecture, albeit radically decentralised. This House has a threshold – a large oval ring that functions as an enclosure and frame – that marks it as a distinct object in space, in which fragmentation determines the circulation of visitors.

Allegory – long tied to shared iconographies from myth, religion and history – is today resurfacing in areas such as autofiction, mysticism, astrology, esotericism and science fiction. Invoking the Mesopotamian goddess of writing, “House of Nisaba” transforms the gallery into an immersive space where newly produced paintings make allegory a vital form for our divided contemporary world.

Among the participating artists are Nicole Eisenman, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Jill Mulleady, Mohammed Sami, Selma Selman, Salman Toor, and Evelyn T. Wang.