This is the sound of our times: an existence at war with life, fractured by greed and strained across both human and more-than-human worlds. Astray from any moral compass, our senses and sensibilities have worn thin, and with them, our capacity to dream and imagine alternative modes of living. Just as the postponement of violence once gave rise to the tales of the Arabian Nights—a constellation of stories told by Scheherazade to her mistrustful husband, unfolding as an ever-deferred horizon—Pavel Brăila's exhibition returns to these folktales, not to retell them, but to keep them open, to resist their ending, and to ask what might follow in our present condition: a sequel still in the making, inviting collective engagement. On this Thousand and Second Night, storytelling re-emerges as a vital act, generating narratives that remain unfinished, that invite participation, and that insist on the possibility of another outcome.

The ancient motif of the flying carpet (bisāt al-rīḥ), originating in Persia, has for centuries fuelled the imagination of storytellers as a vehicle of passage, rescue, and power. From the legend of King Solomon to the Sultan of the Indies, the magic carpet moves across eras and cultures, opening expansive imaginative realms. Pavel Brăila draws on this visual and narrative tradition to reorientate the material and symbolic meaning of the "flying carpet," transforming it into a speculative vehicle, one that gestures towards escape from the ongoing violence that continues to consume life. With the work Magic Carpet (2018), what first appeared as a poetic gesture—reimagining these devices as instruments of rescue and liberation for those whose journeys are halted at borders or end beneath the waves—reveals itself, in retrospect, as a premonition. The drones quietly anticipated the now-normalised militarisation of airspace across contemporary conflict zones, from Europe's eastern margins, felt in the everyday life of Moldova, to the ongoing wars in the Middle East.