In The Mouth Of A Flowering Ghost

For Immediate Release

Figura Avulsa presents In the Mouth of a Flowering Ghost, an exhibition of new works by Mirna Bamieh and Carlos Noronha Feio — with a reception for the artists on Friday June 27th, 2025, 7—9PM.

In the Mouth of a Flowering Ghost brings together the distinct yet resonant practices of Mirna Bamieh and Carlos Noronha Feio through a shared inquiry into the things that resist containment: the sour, the flickering, and the soft edges of becoming. Here, the ghost is not a figure of absence, but a material echo, something that ferments, unsettles, and lingers. Bamieh’s installations, shaped by decay, preservation, and culinary memory, evoke an embodied archive of grief and care. Noronha Feio’s neon works and layered abstractions offer a language of interruption, signals that evade capture, gestures that drift between the graphic and the immaterial. Their practices converge in a space outside linear time: the flowering ghost as a metaphor for what is felt but not fixed, spoken but not named. The mouth, like the exhibition site itself, becomes a threshold between interior and exterior, where what cannot be digested is tended to, allowed to flicker, ferment, and form new vocabularies for what refuses to end.

Mirna Bamieh explores the politics of disappearance and memory production by unpacking the social concerns and limitations of Palestinian communities amid contemporary political dilemmas.
With degrees in Visual arts, Culinary Arts and Psychology/Sociology, she melds food and storytelling to develop socially engaged work through the Palestine Hosting Society — a live art project she founded in 2018. Staging dinner performances and various interventions that draw from food practices as well as the passage of recipes through generations, the project aims to revitalize traditional Palestinian food cultures on the verge of disappearing.
Starting in 2019, with an urge to look at personal history in relation to the collective, the artist has also been reflecting on the process of fermentation through text, sound, ceramics, drawings and video works incorporated into site-specific interactive installations. Her current installation project around fermentation is the series Sour Things.
Bamieh has performed and exhibited her work at venues such as Kunsthaus Zurich, Sharjah Biennial, MoMAPS1, Tanzquartier, TBA21, among others. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, AD Middle East, Conde Nast, Canvas, Contemporânea, The National and Art Monthly, to name a few. She is the recipient of awards such as A.M Qattan Founation’s Artist of the year award, and Josi Guggenhein Foundation award.

Carlos Noronha Feio (Lisbon 1981) consumes, juxtaposes and performs media as research into cultural, local and global identity, adopting culturally significant images, locations and symbols as a form of creative interference with meaning, demonstrating the almost arbitrary nature in which cultural significance is interpreted. He lives in Oeiras, London and Moscow and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art London.
Noronha Feio’s selected solo exhibitions include: Milk and Honey at 3+1 Arte contemporânea, Lisbon( 2024); Arkipélg at CNAD, Cabo-Verde (2023); My Head is my only House unless it rains, SE8 Gallery, London; (sunsight!)/(sunclipse!), a public art project commissioned by Kunstverein am Rosa- Luxemburg-Platz Berlin (2022); even if at heart we are uncertain of the will to connect, there is a common future ahead, Narrative projects, London (2018); A Matter of Trust, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2017); and Oikonomia: A Matter of Trust, MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2015). Group shows: MACAM, Lisbon, Portugal (2025); Painting: Observation Field Part II, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2021); Dissonâncias, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2020); The fabric of felicity, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2018); Variations Portugaises, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Meymac (2018); ‘Futures’, CAC Vilnius (2017); You Are Now Entering_________, CCA Londonderry/Derry (2012); and Image Wars, Abrons Art Centre, New York (2011).
Noronha Feio’s work is included in the publications “The Art of Not Making: The New Artist/Artisan Relationship” as well as in “Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still Life Tradition”, published by Thames & Hudson.