Studio Stories

Academic and author Anthony Downey explores Khaled Zaki’s Ressurection series. These marble works explore the relationship between form and material in the context of geopolitical unrest in the Middle Eastern region and reflect Khaled’s aspirations for a brighter, more hopeful future.

British-Lebanese visual artist Aya Haidar renders the banal extraordinary through her artistic practice that challenges constructed notions of womanhood, motherhood, and domesticity. It’s art that reminds us that everyday actions can serve as a potent form of resistance.

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"As part of a 4 month residency, I was invited as creative practitioner alongside anthropologist Marc Higgin to develop a social integration program for 120 Syrian refugees newly settled within a local Scot community, across rural Aberdeenshire. 

We decided to bring these two extremely disparate communities round the table together by literally bringing them round a table. 

We set up No.11 Café, a donations based hub for local, vulnerable and isolated community members to come together, transcending language and borders in a bid to share stories, customs and culture through food and communality.”

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We step into the studio of the interdisciplinary Emirati artist as he opens his group exhibition, Postmordial Soup, in Dubai.

In this series we delve into the lives and artistic journeys of artists in diaspora. Despite the passage of time and physical distance, their homelands continue to shape their artistic practice in profound ways. 

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In this series we delve into the lives and artistic journeys of artists in diaspora. Despite the passage of time and physical distance, their homelands continue to shape their artistic practice in profound ways.

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As she launches her first solo exhibition at Tabari Artspace Gallery, Emirati visual artist Almaha Jaralla shares insight into her artistic inspirations that span her aunt’s archival photography and the shifting architecture of the region.

For Seham, the visual artist has produced a series of mixed media artworks on canvas that depart from the artist’s own archival family portraits taken in Abu Dhabi during the 1980s. Jaralla understands these intimate portraits as a window into the essence of the city during a period of rapid social and physical transformation in the Gulf. Jaralla's work highlights the fashions and familial dynamics of that era, a moment when parks and beaches were key physical spaces that shaped the community, and when large family outings were commonplace.

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Through his compositions, visual artist Khaldoun Hijazin exposes dense webs of allusion. His works on canvas negotiate systems of power and ideologies, particularly relating to the Arab world, approached through the artist’s own blend of dark humour. The son of a comedian and key progenitor of social and political theatre in Jordan, Hijazin’s choice of subject matter demonstrates a preoccupation with the dynamics of representation and the hierarchies of the visible.

We step into the studio of the Amman-based creative to discover the ways that inspirations as varied as political theatre, baroque and critical theory contribute to his art.

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We celebrate the women artists breaking boundaries and reconfiguring gendered stereotypes. In this article, contemporary women artists share their perspectives on how gender, as a category of identification, shapes their experience as an artist. For some art forms a medium through which gendered stereotypes might be addressed while for others art is a space where they can reflect upon their womanhood. Then, there are those that find gender an invalid and limiting lens.

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As part of the launch of her gallery solo exhibiton at Tabari Artspace, Dubai, editor and critic, Nadine Khalil, reflects on the on the oeuvre of contemporary Lebanese artist, Chafa Ghaddar.

Khalil explains that Chafa Ghaddar’s visual vocabulary draws from her professional background in decorative painting and fresco, an industry that can be separated from her education in the fine arts even while she has merged the two. Early memories that pulled her towards this field include how physical traces of humidity manifested on the walls of her childhood home in Lebanon and the need for constant repair against contamination. While she has translated this understanding of transformative surfaces in an embodied way, through attempts at capture, her process of accruing sediments and consequently stripping them away gesture towards abstract expressionism, albeit in a more controlled manner than action painting.

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