'When I first encountered a work by Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, its playful, abstract-yet-organic form electrified my curatorial senses.' Maya Allison, Executive Director and Chief Curator of The NYUAD Art Gallery 

In psychology, Memory Drum is a theory that unconscious neural patterns acquired from past experience are stored in the central nervous system within a memory storage organ, analogous to the drum used to store music in the old-fashioned roll pianos. It also refers to the “drum memory” of early computers, a magnetic storage device. Ibrahim relates it to the theory of innateness in developmental psychology - that children have an innate knowledge. This innate knowledge for the artist is more important than that learnt later on throughout the course of life. Most people lose touch with it through learned behaviours, but Ibrahim is constantly aware of it and this underlines his instictive and automatic creative process. 

'Ibrahim's work shares its playful tactility with the sculptures of Franz West, a fellow master of papier mâché...The artist derives those colours, in turn, from the sunsets the mountains block from his view. Unable to see the sun sink below the horizon, he has long imagined brighttones of fuchsia and marigold,' Evan Moffitt, Frieze