Exhibitions

In Henna Nights, Almaha Jaralla revisits a familial photograph that captures a celebratory ritual resonant across the Gulf’s port cities. The large-scale painting depicts a henna night scene that departs from conventional representations of feminine adornment, instead revealing a distinctly South Asian-inflected ceremony in which men anoint their bodies with henna and turmeric. Jaralla’s work draws attention to the layered cultural exchanges that have long defined coastal life along the Arabian Peninsula, where maritime trade fostered hybrid social practices and shared aesthetics.

Through her reimagining of the domestic image, Jaralla transforms a private moment into a meditation on the Gulf’s plural identities. The painting’s vivid surface, alive with pigment and gesture, becomes a site through which belonging is negotiated, not fixed. In her visual vocabulary, tradition is neither static nor singular; rather, it embodies the porousness of ports, where Indian, Arab, and African influences converge to produce an ever-evolving sense of the local