Almaha Jaralla is an Emirati painter whose work centres on the lived textures of the Gulf and the inherited legacies that structure that life, including ancestral ties to Aden. Working predominantly in pigment on textile, she treats fabric as a material that holds the intimacy of the domestic as well as the trace of human movement across time and lineage. Her compositions restage habitual scenes and gestures from ordinary life in the region, distilling them into archetypal relations. Faces and details recede so that posture, adjacency, colour and ground become the carriers of meaning. Jaralla’s paintings stage human motion at a small scale - pauses at roadside, collective rest, provisional gatherings - to register broader questions of belonging, settlement and social formation. Colour palettes echo the tonal drift of aged photographs, allowing temporality to surface as atmosphere rather than narrative. By compressing personal memory into simplified pictorial structures, her work shows how history persists in everyday arrangements of bodies, materials and space.Jaralla’s work is held in public and private collections internationally, including the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE.
Read more
Safeya Sharif Al Awadhi is an Emirati artist whose practice unfolds through surreal geometry. Forms that feel dreamt before they are built. Her work inhabits a hallucinatory space between structure and illusion, where lucid-dream logic shapes visual systems that appear architectural. Through large-scale sculptures and spatial interventions, she constructs suspended frames that act as portals that distort perspective and function. Sharif’s language of repetition and physical interruption evokes a hyperreality. Familiar motifs such as windows, doors, and corridors are abstracted into floating symbols of presence, absence, and the instability of space.
Read more
Amna Al Memari is an interdisciplinary artist based in Abu Dhabi whose work investigates embodiment, Islamic mysticism, and transpersonal experience through sculpture and installation. Drawing on Sufi philosophy and the concept of Tawhid, she explores the porous boundaries between body and spirit, intuition and reason, and the material and immaterial, creating works that invite reflection on perception, consciousness, and interconnectedness
Read more
Anna Seaman is a UAE-based arts writer and independent curator specialising in contemporary art across the Middle East. Originally from the UK, she has worked in the region since 2008 as an editor, cultural commentator and consultant, collaborating with institutions, artists and cultural organisations on exhibitions, publications and strategic content.
Read more
