Frieze London 2026: Solo Presentation by Ahmad Ghossein

The Dance of The Sun

When Ahmad Ghossein’s father returned after the “war” ended in November 2024, he found that around twenty of his beehives had perished. He had been obsessed with beekeeping.

Before the war, Ghossein’s father told him that the constant presence of Israeli drones in the sky had deeply disrupted the bees, leaving them disoriented. The name “drone” itself comes from the male bee. Worker bees leave the hive to forage and must return to guide the others through the “dance of the sun,” a figure-eight movement that signals direction, distance, and the richness of nectar, with each detail aligned with the sun’s angle.

But the worker bee often lost its way and never returned to the hive because the frequent presence of drones disrupted its signals, causing disorientation and starvation within the colony. In some cases, when the drone’s noise was strong or it flew at low altitude, the whole hive panicked and launched a suicidal attack against it, leading to the death of the entire colony.

Ghossein once read that studies have shown that drones emit sounds at frequencies ranging from 100 Hz to 500 Hz, which can potentially interfere with the behavior of bees. Bees are sensitive to sound frequencies in the range of 250 Hz to 500 Hz, and this range overlaps with the noise generated by drones. Prolonged exposure to such frequencies can disrupt their navigation, foraging behavior, and communication within the colony. It may also cause stress to bees, leading to disorientation or avoidance of areas where drones are active.

Since the military skirmishes began on the border of Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel, Ghossein called his father daily, urging him to leave the war zone, to leave his house, his village. But his father insisted there was no danger in these clashes, and that he would only flee when the great war and displacement arrived, which indeed happened in September 2024. And when it came, he finally left.

Throughout that entire period, his father sent Ghossein a quick photograph of dawn every day, of the rising sun. The photographs were taken on his phone, vertically rather than horizontally, sometimes shaky, sometimes tilted. But always at the moment of sunrise, or seconds after. Sometimes, due to the poor quality of the phone camera, the whole image glowed orange. The yellow sun and its rays appeared from the same angle, from the same veranda of his house.

Over time, Ghossein began to anticipate these photographs. Soon, he had amassed a large collection of sunrise images from the same angle, each slightly different in timing or shade of orange. To him, these photographs were proof of life, as though, by sending them, his father was saying: I am still alive. Another day has dawned on me in this endless war.

Quickly, the photographs became an archive, a record of a year of anxiety Ghossein lived through on his father’s behalf.

On another wall, five works created using the same technique depict bees, a drone, fields of flowers, and destroyed houses. Together, these images bring into proximity elements of nature, technology, memory, and destruction.

At the center of the exhibition space, a resin sculpture of a beehive serves as a focal point, connecting the works through themes of labor, fragility, collective life, and survival.

In 2026, Israel destroyed the village entirely, using approximately 450 tons of explosives.