At The Third Line in Dubai, Spanish-Moroccan artist Anuar Khalifi presents Remember the Future, his third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Running until March 1 2026, the exhibition brings together a new body of large-scale paintings and works on paper that move between reality and imagination, memory and projection, life and death.

Khalifi’s practice has long resisted fixed readings — geographic, political, or symbolic — and Remember the Future marks a quiet but decisive evolution. The pictorial space expands, compositions grow more intricate, figures no longer dominate the frame so much as inhabit it. Chairs, vessels, flora, interiors, and male figures appear again, but now they exist within carefully constructed environments that feel at once intimate and ceremonial.

Shaped by the artist’s sustained engagement with magical realism, art history, poetry, and lived experience, the exhibition proposes painting as a participatory space rather than a static image. Viewers are invited not to decode, but to dwell — to meet the work with attentiveness, imagination, and presence. As Khalifi himself suggests, meaning is not delivered, it is encountered.

In conversation, Khalifi speaks in associations rather than conclusions. References to cinema, mythology, childhood, death, and time surface organically, forming a web rather than a linear argument. What emerges is a philosophy of painting rooted in intimacy and openness — and a refusal to reduce art to explanation.

— Anuar, almost every one of your paintings feels like a portrait. Who is the man we see again and again?

— Naturally, it is autobiographical. My paintings come from my lived experience, my reflections — but I am not alone in them. They act like mirrors. For me, and also for the viewer.

If you read a novel or look at a painting, you need imagination. Without it, nothing opens. I would be lying if I said the figure isn’t me — but at the same time, there is always the other. And in the end, when you fully enter something, you disappear into it. The mystery disappears with you.

In this exhibition especially, there is reality, imagination, things I have seen, things I have absorbed. Everything eventually becomes memory. Even what you witness directly stains you and becomes part of yourself. Why one image insists on being painted and another doesn’t — that remains a mystery.

The exhibition lives on the edge between imagination and reality. If those are two sides of a coin, I am interested in the rare moment when the coin lands on its edge. That thin surface where depth suddenly appears.

— One particularly interesting character is the bullfighter. Why was he important for this exhibition?

— The bullfighter interested me deeply. There is a misconception that bullfighting contradicts Arab or Muslim identity, but historically it came from Muslim Andalusian traditions. Goya shows this. The figure exists.

For this exhibition — which is about journey, life, and death — the bullfighter felt inevitable. He dances with death in a circular, cosmological space. The traje de luces — the suit of lights — is like the sun at the center of the universe. It requires a particular kind of being.

This figure represents someone who undertakes the journey differently. Not like a boxer — which has been represented endlessly — but something more ritualistic. Even Picasso returned to bullfighting and the Minotaur: the space between human and animal, between instinct and consciousness.

— Death feels central to Remember the Future. Why now?

— Art should talk about life — expansion, possibility. But without death, life means nothing. I didn’t want to treat death as something morbid. It is also a celebration.

We live in a time where death is avoided in conversation, especially in the Western world. In my family, it was always present. Very natural.

Remember the Future also came from thinking about memory. As painters, we work entirely through memory. Even when copying something, it passes through memory first. Nothing is immediate.

The title plays with the idea of time travel — the fantasy of going back and changing things. But as an artist, the only thing you can truly change is how you remember. We all end in the same place. What differs is the journey.

— You speak often about presence. How does painting hold time?

— Painting captures time in a way nothing else can. You feel the artist’s presence embedded in the surface. That is why asking how long a painting takes makes no sense. Sometimes the shortest moment captures everything.

When you paint, you disconnect — it is a form of time travel. Not linear. More like sailing. You don’t know which shore you will reach.

That intimacy is sacred. Even if I speak about symbols, there are things no one will ever fully know. I think of them as intimate prayers. Technology can’t replicate that.

— Your work is rich in symbolism, yet you resist fixed meanings. Why?

— Symbols aren't singular. The moment you say, “this means that,” you kill it. That is a modern trap — the idea that the self must explain itself.

I prefer symbols that are universal, plural, capable of holding a million meanings. Chairs, flowers, vessels — they exist across cultures. Meaning depends on where you stand.

One drawing includes a medal placed on a figure — the only figure that feels no longer alive. I drew it in crayon, in a childish way. Only later did I realise: perhaps I killed him through the symbol. Meanings expand even after the work is finished.

— Still life plays a strong role in your work. Why mix the mundane with the sacred?

— Because they were never separate. That separation is modern. In tradition, the mundane sustains the sacred, and the sacred sustains the mundane. A chair, a flower, a prayer — they hold equal weight.

Absurdity doesn’t exist. It is just perception. Magic realism works the same way. Some people struggle with it because they don’t use imagination. They read letters, not words.

Art isn't magic. It doesn’t work automatically. The viewer must meet it halfway.

— In an era of digital saturation, why insist on painting?

— Because even now, people gather to discuss a flat, silent surface. A painting has no sound, no movement — and yet it holds attention.

Technology divides by zero and creates nothing. Humans break and create beauty. Imagination is natural. We are simply taught to turn it off.

An artist must return to that childish, mythical state — the fascination with everything.

— Why was Dubai the right place for this exhibition?

— It was very intentional. The first time I saw The Third Line, I thought: this is the gallery. This is the place to begin this journey.

I refuse to be boxed by adjectives — Muslim artist, Arab artist, African artist. These identities inform my work, but they don’t define it. I consider myself extraterritorial, in permanent exile.

There are places that understand multiplicity naturally, and Dubai is one of them. Here, I can exist just as a painter, and not as an Arab, Muslim, or African artist. The Third Line is like an extension of my studio, where I can have conversations with people about my work without it being codified by the symbols I use — which is something that can happen elsewhere.