François Ghebaly is proud to present Imagine, all this happened just an hour ago, Ali Eyal’s debut exhibition with the gallery. Ali Eyal is an Iraqi artist working across painting, drawing, assemblage, and film to examine how personal memory tangles with political violence and loss. Born in Baghdad in 1994, Eyal orients much of his practice around vanished places: the unelectrified dark of a childhood bedroom in the city; an uncle’s farm south of Baghdad; and other familial spaces now destroyed and existing only in the artist’s imagination to which he returns again and again through the circuitous routes of memory and reinterpretation. His images unfold in a cartoonish, sometimes grotesque idiom that sidesteps realism. Instead, Eyal finds in exaggeration and…