The Threshold of Non-Representation and the Poetics of Transcendence

Silence is the Door by Zibeyda Seyidova

The exhibition Silence is the Door, currently on view at The Small Gallery, Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, Foresterhill, Aberdeen (10 February – 30 April 2024), refuses the usual parameters of what we have come to expect from contemporary abstraction. To speak of Zibeyda Seyidova’s work solely in terms of absence and plenitude, concealment and disclosure, would be to repeat the well-worn language of metaphysics. What matters in Aberdeen is not an allegory of divine withdrawal but the precise way her canvases recalibrate themselves within the infrastructural logic of the hospital environment. Here, abstraction is not sanctified retreat but lived intervention: an art of thresholds that unsettles the line between representation, architecture, and care.

Installed across the corridors and chambers of Grampian Hospitals, the works interrupt the daily rhythm of medical space. Instead of the reverential silence of the gallery, they occupy zones where silence is already charged: the waiting of patients, the quiet dread of diagnosis, the fragile pauses of convalescence. Her pale surfaces—off-whites, muted greys, brittle ochres—do not announce themselves but almost dissolve into the surrounding walls. It is precisely this near-invisibility that makes them potent. They are not spectacle but interruption, fragile screens of attention folded into the everyday mechanics of care.

Technically, the works are marked by Seyidova’s restrained layering of oil, where cracks and diagonals register not as compositional devices but as lived fractures. The canvases bear a tension between the infrastructural and the ephemeral: they echo the geometry of ceilings, flooring, and sterile partitions, yet simultaneously resist them. In this oscillation, one senses what might be called a threshold of non-representation, where painting neither depicts nor escapes but instead lingers at the point of indistinction. These canvases seem to withhold image altogether, proposing instead a poetics of transcendence that does not lift one beyond the hospital walls but folds transcendence into them.

Placed against the backdrop of contemporary British abstraction, Seyidova’s austerity stands apart. Where artists such as Daniel Sinsel or Alison Turnbull mobilise colour, tactility, or playful disruptions, Seyidova strips her painting to its barest residue. The result is a radical sparseness that courts the risk of vanishing. In an art world saturated by spectacle and visual assertion, her refusal to clamour is significant. It is a strategy of withdrawal, a discipline of reduction, where silence becomes its own medium. Her works in Aberdeen act less like objects of contemplation than acts of accompaniment: they are there without insisting, quietly present within the fragile economies of attention that hospitals demand.

This strategy is not unprecedented in her practice. In her earlier exhibition Light Embraces Shadow at Galerie Cinéma in Lyon (2022), Seyidova worked with chiaroscuro geometries that probed the dialectics of light and darkness. That project earned her the Jeune Vague Award in France (2023), where she was named winner in the 2D category. Yet whilst the Lyon exhibition staged an almost dramatic interplay between illumination and obscurity, the Aberdeen works are quieter, sparer, even more attenuated. If Lyon demonstrated her ability to command abstraction with intensity, Aberdeen shows her willingness to risk near-invisibility, to let silence itself become the image.

Based between the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, Seyidova inhabits a transnational position that informs the reception of her practice. The discipline of reduction that runs through her work is not a parochial gesture but a cosmopolitan austerity, carrying echoes of Islamic aniconism whilst remaining conversant with European traditions of abstraction. This mobility lends her paintings a resonance that exceeds national idioms; they operate across cultural contexts yet remain firmly rooted in the intimacy of their encounter.

In this sense, Silence is the Door complicates what it means to speak of transcendence in art. Transcendence here is not an escape into metaphysical abstraction but a reconfiguration of how painting can inhabit, and even heal, institutional space. The door that silence opens is not towards the beyond but towards an expanded present, one in which abstraction becomes a form of care. Seyidova demonstrates that painting still holds the capacity to resonate beyond the confines of art discourse—not by grand gestures, but through the most delicate of thresholds.

The Small Gallery Grampian Hospitals Art TrustForesterhill, Aberdeen, AB25 2ZNUnited Kingdom

Exhibition dates: 10 February – 30 April 2024

Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.