What Grows Between Borders: C.J. Chueca &Noormah Jamal
Art Cologne Palma, Mallorca Booth P101 April 9 - 12, 2026
KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is proud to be participating at the inaugural Art Cologne Palma Mallorca, Spain exhibiting artists C.J. Chueca (Peru) and Noormah Jamal (Pakistan), in a duo exhibition titled What Grows Between Borders located in the projects section booth #P101.
Inspired by her nomadic travels, C. J. Chueca will present a series of hand-built ceramic “Airplane Windows” capturing the transient, suspended experience of flight, a metaphor for the immigrant experience. Each piece mirrors the size of an airplane window, transforming a mundane object into a portal to the sublime, where the sky and horizon meet abstracted aerial landscapes.
Beginning with photographs taken in-flight, C.J. Chueca translates the ephemeral beauty of the sky, landscapes, runways, and horizons into ceramic, inviting the viewer to pause, and meditate on the delicate balance between permanence and transience, as well as the power of transformation. Sitting by the window, one is neither departing nor arriving, simply suspended in pause, the space between before and after. The airplane window becomes a space for reflection, a place to inhabit solitude and contemplate the ever-changing sky. Its colors shift with light, echoing the transitory nature of experience, thought, and emotion. The cracks in some windows remind us of the fragility of life and experience: enduring like archaeological artifacts, yet vulnerable, capable of shattering in an instant.
In conversation with the windows, Normah Jamal creates hand-painted and glazed ceramic ‘weeds’ with surrealist heads popping out of the corners and seams of the booth, as if spontaneously and randomly growing from the walls. By exemplifying plant life’s resilience and ability to grow in difficult conditions, the weeds capture the immigrant experience. “Some spaces of neglect breed dreamers: the want, the need to be seen. Yet, you are unplanned. Unwanted. Unpleasant to most. Much like the way people relate to weeds, acceptance often depends on perception: if you’re colorful or pretty enough, maybe you’re seen as a flower. If not, you’re dismissed as a weed, something unwanted, to be plucked and discarded”. Tellingly, Noormah’s sculptures are scattered around the walls, seeking attention and visibility, while bravely reaching out to interact with the other artworks.
On a pedestal front and center in the booth, there will be Noormah Jamal’s ceramic vessels. These are not closed forms but eruptive ones, edges split into petal-like spikes, surfaces punctured, bodies sprouting faces and limbs. The vessel is no longer a passive container; it becomes a site where something insists on being seen. Across her practice, Jamal explores “personal baggage” and the weight of lived experience, often through symbolism and untold narratives. Here, that weight does not sit quietly inside. It pushes outward. The forms embedded within the vessels, half-hidden, half-forming, suggest identities in flux, caught between concealment and revelation.
Together, C.J. Chueca and Noormah Jamal would like to engage viewers in an intimate reflection on the notion of human passage and transformation, highlighting the delicate balance between fragility and endless possibilities that come with it.