On view at In Between Ibiza from 24 May to 24 July, If Thoughts Become Things reveals a quieter, more intuitive side of Karimah Hassan&mdash;shaped by the island&rsquo;s off-season stillness.

&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t plan for this series to exist,&rdquo; Karimah tells me, her words arriving softly, as though mid-thought. &ldquo;But the island asked something different of me. I had to listen.&rdquo;
This is how If Thoughts Become Things was born&mdash;not through strategy or structure. It emerged quietly, in response to the island and everything it asked her to feel. Twelve large-scale paintings, each spanning up to three metres, bloomed from that internal question: If thoughts become things, what am I really creating with mine?
Painted across the pale months of winter, the works hum with the <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/ibiza-dreamers-eric-aleix-sanllehy">island&rsquo;s</a> lesser-seen rhythms. &ldquo;Winter in Ibiza is a completely different island,&rdquo; she shares. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a softness, a hush. The light turns this almost holy blue, not ultramarine, but something gentler, more celestial.&rdquo; That light, its strange serenity, its sun-faded melancholy&mdash;seeps into every canvas like a ghostly watermark. These are not sunny travelogues. These are psychic cartographies.

&ldquo;The island asked something different of me. I had to listen.&rdquo; &mdash; Karimah Hassan

Karimah - The Time Has Come to Receive

Karimah arrived expecting to show existing work. Instead, she shed it all. &ldquo;Even though I&rsquo;ve been to Ibiza before, this time something opened up. A deeper presence.&rdquo; The paintings that emerged carry this sense of quiet urgency. They are not abstract for abstraction&rsquo;s sake, nor emotional in any saccharine way. They pulse. They withhold. They ask more than they answer.
The island, it seems, did not just serve as a backdrop but a collaborator. Flamingos&mdash;those mythic pink creatures she encountered unexpectedly in the salt flats became both symbol and subject. Local women, &ldquo;designers, anthropologists, mothers, dreamers&rdquo;&mdash;shaped the <a href="https://preview.lofficielibiza.com/art/20-years-of-feminine-audacity-the-max-mara-art-prize-for-women-is-on-display-in-florence">feminine energy</a> of the work. There is even a nod to Tanit, the island&rsquo;s ancient goddess of life and death. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s this alchemical mix in <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/riomar-ibiza-where-the-island-slows-down">Ibiza</a>&mdash;disco and devotion, beauty and ritual. All of it worked on me.&rdquo;

Photo Sylvie Gianella

This <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/fashion/kate-moss-rock-n-roll-for-zara-mert-alas-marcus-piggott">alchemy</a> is not painted literally. Hassan&rsquo;s canvases are dream-logged, not documentary. &ldquo;Definitely landscapes of the mind,&rdquo; she explains. &ldquo;The frequency of Ibiza translated through me: the colours, the heat, the mythology, the stillness.&rdquo; The result? Work that feels as though it was whispered rather than shouted. Paintings titled like diary entries: What Do Your Dreams Taste Like?, Where Is This Taking Us?&mdash;each one a question disguised as art, or vice versa.
Despite their scale, these works retain a kind of intimacy. &ldquo;At a time when the world feels heavy&mdash;politically, emotionally, environmentally&mdash;I found myself returning to the personal. The intimate gesture.&rdquo; Hassan never claims to solve or transcend. She transmutes. She lets her thoughts become brushstrokes and her brushstrokes become frequencies. Some bright. Others bruised.
She paints early&mdash;7 or 8am, while the island still dozes. &ldquo;That early rhythm helped me bypass the noise of doubt,&rdquo; she says. A morning stretch of painting, a run along Talamanca, a coffee ritual. These were not routines. They were grounding acts. &ldquo;It was less about performance and more about presence.&rdquo;

Presence, in fact, is what anchors the entire exhibition. The work is airy but never vague. Soft but never slight. Her approach to colour is surgical. &ldquo;Colour is therapy for me,&rdquo; she explains. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not just visual&mdash;it&rsquo;s emotional. Energetic. I&rsquo;ll walk to a fruit stand just to recalibrate my palette.&rdquo; She speaks of colour as others might speak of sound, food, or scent. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s an ingredient, but also a conversation.&rdquo;
There&rsquo;s a painterly musicality, too. February was Max Richter and Hans Zimmer; March, Stevie Nicks and Bobby Womack. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s definitely a tempo to this series&mdash;sometimes soft and soaring, sometimes gritty and raw.&rdquo; If the exhibition had a soundtrack, she says, it would be Edge of Seventeen scored over the Interstellar soundtrack. &ldquo;Grounded and galactic. Feminine, mystic, cinematic.&rdquo;
It fits. There&rsquo;s something cinematic about Hassan&rsquo;s presence on the island. She&rsquo;s one of a growing number of <a href="https://preview.lofficielibiza.com/categories/art">artists</a> seeking a return to mythic places&mdash;Ibiza, Marrakesh, Bali, Mexico&mdash;not for the aesthetic, but for the spiritual subtext. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s this hunger for reverence,&rdquo; she writes. &ldquo;Not dogma. Reverence. For rhythm. For beauty. For nature.&rdquo;
And perhaps for duality. Her work this season does not flatter with constant light. Instead, it flickers. There is radiance, yes&mdash;but also shadow. &ldquo;How do you hold both?&rdquo; she asks. &ldquo;Softness and strength, light and shadow, surrender and structure.&rdquo; These polarities are not resolved; they are reverently held.

&ldquo;Ibiza reminds me that beauty doesn&rsquo;t have to be performative,&rdquo; she adds. &ldquo;That freedom can be soft.&rdquo; She leaves the island with handmade dresses, jewellery crafted by friends but also, she says, with &ldquo;a deeper relationship to the sensory.&rdquo; Art, for Hassan, is not escape. It is a kind of armouring. A way of saying: we make beautiful things, and I&rsquo;m wearing that belief on my skin.

This is what If Thoughts Become Things ultimately offers&mdash;not resolution, but resonance. A sensorial spell for a world in flux. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s always the right time to make something beautiful,&rdquo; she reminds me. &ldquo;To harvest joy. To live in colour. To create in honour of the life we&rsquo;re living, not in spite of it.&rdquo;

If Thoughts Become Things by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/karimah.hassan/">Karimah Hassan</a>
May 24 - July 24, 2025
<a href="https://www.inbetweenibiza.com">In Between</a>, Ibiza

The Oracle of Talamanca: Karimah Hassan’s Colour-Drenched Dreamstate

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