6 Exhibitions to See During EXPO Chicago 2026
"Across No one Knows but the Sky, Youssef Nabil makes an uneasy ally of amnesia. The show embodies a dreamlike mood: the photographs and films on view – which span from 2005 to 2025 – seem to perch on the brink of evaporation as if levitating in a zone of impermanence. Notably, most of the works place their human subjects beside natural phenomena that will far outlive them, from the tangled roots in Self Portrait with Roots (2008) to the recurrence of water in works like Sardinia (2005), Say Goodbye (2009) and You will forget (2021). It is as if the artist is enacting his own mortality within the controlled setting of the photographic frame, which will – like the topographies he figures – also survive him. There is mercy, perhaps, in this erosion of infinitude as landscape and camera set a stage for an existential pact with the inevitability of forgetting, and of being forgotten."
Excerpted words written by Camille Bacon for Frieze.
