“It did not happen.” Flickering across one of the screens in Huda Takriti’s Starry Nights / Or, of that night when stars disappeared (2025), these words haunt this exhibition of three artists from across the Arab world. Curated by May Makki, the show borrows its title from Freud’s 1899 essay of the same name, in which the “father of psychoanalysis” questions the processes by which early memories are transmuted into other forms, false recollections, and allusive narratives, that are more palatable to the conscious mind and “screen” us from the past. “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess,” Freud writes. We cannot remember, only project. Misinformation, gaslighting, erasure. What were for Freud problems for the individual and her unconscious are now a vastly more generalized, more literal phenomenon. The real-time operations of a networked and globalized media landscape, obscuring very real violence with smoke and mirrors, have relieved our superegos of the task of repression and fabulation, as Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has made starkly clear. Freud’s screen, a simple metaphor for memory’s occlusions, has now mutated into a ubiquitous …