Nabil Assaf's 'NO ONE BUT ONE' at CENTRÅL, Johannesburg

Lebanese artist Nabil Assaf's exhibition 'NO ONE BUT ONE' is currently on view at CENTRÅL in Victoria Yards, Johannesburg, until the end of September 2026. The show features stencil works derived from anonymous flea-market photographs collected from Beirut, Johannesburg, Madrid, Marseille, and Paris. Assaf, who works under the moniker NAB, scans and digitally cleans these vintage portraits before cutting them into stencils and spray-painting them onto walls, often in Beirut, where the city's weathered surfaces become part of the artwork. The project explores themes of memory, anonymity, and the fragility of identity, as the subjects' names have been lost to time. Assaf's practice is rooted in the history of stencil art, from political urgency to contemporary gallery contexts. The exhibition at CENTRÅL includes installation views and works such as 'Two Love' (2020), 'Raj' (2020), 'Sunday Three' (2021), and 'Old Seat' (2020), with source images from Beirut, Paris, and family archives. The essay accompanying the exhibition, written by Adilson De Oliveira, poetically describes the process from the perspective of Assaf's Stanley knife, highlighting the intimate and laborious act of cutting. Assaf's work has been shown in Beirut and internationally, and this exhibition marks a significant presentation in South Africa.