Mirrors from the Sidewalk

A central theme in Alymamah Rashed’s work is the belief that bodily connection to specific environments and elements can facilitate spiritual awakening. This idea shapes her latest body of work, presented in her solo exhibition Mirrors from the Sidewalk at Tabari Artspace.

In this new series of large-scale watercolour and oil canvases, Rashed draws from her everyday and extraordinary journeys. She reflects on the immersion of the body in water, soil and sky, embracing floral elements and the everyday objects that she collects from the sidewalks that she traverses in Kuwait.

Rashed connects her personal experiences to Deleuze's theory of difference in repetition. She reflects on how the cyclical nature of the earth provides fresh encounters. In her four-panel series I have fixed your roots in the soils of my earth to reach your 7 skies (for I am near your heart), for example, she presents a spiritual theory inspired by the seven heavens in Islam. Drawing on the symbolic power of dates, often gifted from neighbours' and grandmothers' palm trees, Rashed links the act of sharing these dates with a metaphysical ascent into the skies. In her vision, bodies become intertwined, multiplied, and transformed into angels, embodying the fragility of earthly existence.

B.1994

Visual artist Alymamah Rashed's surrealist paintings investigate the discourse of her own body as a Muslima Cyborg of the post-internet generation; fluctuating between the east and the west.

Rashed's notion of the Muslima Cyborg unites the fleshed body, the thobe, and a combination of the two which comes to form a third space - the one that she emits onto her canvas. Rashed engages with the cyborg not as a mechanical object but in the sense of spiritual intelligence, as a motor, or a form of technology, as opposed to artificial intelligence or programming. Referencing late Algerian modernist pioneer Baya Mahieddine's idiosyncratic form of autobiographical portraiture, her art negotiates her female subjectivity, regional folklore and the every day banal objects that Rashed encounters as well as the rapid social shifts that she has witnessed such as the rapid industrialisation of the Gulf region.

Full Biography

Mirrors from the Sidewalk: Alymamah Rashed ,

Mirrors from the Sidewalk: Alymamah Rashed

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