The solo exhibition Face to Face/ روبه رو presented at Futures Gallery, Melbourne in February 2026, brings together recent paintings and drawings through which Alavi documents and processes feelings connected to his queer selfhood. Traversing personal histories of migration and displacement across Afghanistan, Iran and Australia, the works recall faces, landscapes and moments held within these geographies.

Inspired by dreams, found images, specific memories of places Alavi has occupied, and lines from poetry—his own and others—the paintings trace a constellation of sources. Mountains from the Daikundi province of Afghanistan, where Alavi was born, appear in certain works. In others, three friends sit in gentle camaraderie. Marcel Proust’s seminal novel In Search of Lost Time serves as a driving influence, informing Alavi’s approach to memory as something fragmentary, sensory, and nonlinear. Like Proust, Alavi does not attempt to reconstruct the past in a factual or chronological way; rather, memory emerges allusively, through atmosphere, gesture, and feeling.

Alavi likens his paintings to haiku poems—short, spontaneous, quiet, and ambiguous. The series of small paintings included in this exhibition encapsulates this, with their sketch-like quality embodying the delicate heft of memory. Pigments whose hues are on the cusp of fluorescent reveal the outlines of figures and imagery. Execution becomes quicker in works on paper exhibited from the Another Kind series, an ongoing body of work that acts as a visual diary, forming a phenomenology of experience where memory, perceptions of the past, and the present merge and are transcribed in the form of drawings. Doubles appear in faces and aligning crescent moons, while a figure holds trays of eggs and poems feature in select works. Taken together, Face to Face / روبه‌رو unfolds as a tender body of work in which memory is continually re-encountered and reconceived as the shifting inner palpitations of the self.