DRIVER AND PASSENGER
August 7th - September 19th 2026
Abed Elmajid Shalabi
Opening Reception: Friday, August 7th 6-9 pm
Cleo the Project Space is pleased to present Driver and Passenger, a solo exhibition featuring work by Abed Shalabi. This installation exists in the tension of power dynamics, reflecting frictions in a global landscape where submission is a ritual found in the folds of everyday life.
The fabricated signage throughout the gallery accommodates abstracted text pulled from online posts by Palestinian refugees: ‘What Will You Do With All of This Blood? / What Will All of This Blood Do To You?’. The strain between their legibility and the powerful indictment of abuse of power is heightened according to Shalabi ‘like a scream that cannot be heard’. It is a means to capture how communication fails at the full disclosure of information when the message is being funneled through a tightening system of extreme force. These works are situated within the visual language of U.S. road signs camouflaged as a mapping of mundane authority and rule with civic service perpetuating the implementation of their larger deliveries.
This along with the text and its abstraction provide unease in the direction of a system that thrives in the illusion of justice with violence as its main champion.
Alongside this moment there is a large sculpture at the center of the space containing two ceramic-cast leather seats from a car, connected by a two-headed gas pump which penetrates both of them. It is a complement to the signage’s challenge of systemic authority through the lens of transportation. The U.S.’s dedication to capitalism through its strength in the industrialization of the automobile permits an access point to explore relationships of submission with embedded familiarity. While gas pumps as objects are intrinsically tied to scrutiny over the narrative concerning oil in the Arab world and who controls it, Shalabi challenges that you also look at the action taking place at the site of the sculpture in its eroticism. Any power exchange has hale roots in passion and dependency where love can be mobilized for violence and there is neither evidence in this act for filling up a tank of obedience as much as there is for siphoning it.
Driver and Passenger is on view at Cleo the Project Space August 7th - September 19th, 2026.
Abed Elmajid Shalabi (b. 1991, Nazareth, Palestine) is a Palestinian artist based in Richmond, Virginia. His work is concerned with migration, globalization, and Palestinian narratives of displacement and colonization. Shalabi creates highly reflective ceramic sculptures cast from industrial objects associated with protection, extraction, and infrastructure, including bulletproof vests, gas pumps, and safety seating systems. His work explores the failures of the modernization project in the Middle East. As the grandson of Palestinian laborers who became citizens of Israel following the 1948 Nakba, he is interested in the gap between labor and construction work and the polished, seductive surface of his glossy ceramic forms.By remaking these objects in ceramic, he shifts them from functional systems into unstable images of power, where surface and fragility contradict their original promise of safety and control. Shalabi has been a fellow at Hamiltonian Artists, Washington, DC (2022–2024), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2024, 2020), and Lighthouse Works,Fishers Island, NY (2023). He is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artistic Research Grant (2024) and Emergency Grant (2023). He earned his MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University,Richmond, VA (2021), his BFA in Fine Arts from Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Ramat Gan, Israel (2019), and studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME (2022) and at ISCP, Brooklyn, NY (2024), NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023) and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts (2023). His works have been featured in exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Luhring Augustine, New York; C24 Gallery, New York; SARA'S, New York; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; the OCCCA, Santa Ana, CA, and CCA in Tel Aviv.