Through her practice, Roudhah Al Mazrouei weaves together tradition and contemporary inquiry, working with materials drawn from lived landscapes and inherited knowledge. Rocks gathered from mountainous terrains, sikham charcoal derived from native trees, and snaah—a saffron and mahlep mixture historically used as perfume—function as living archives. These materials are not merely aesthetic choices but carriers of memory, transformation, and embodied histories shaped by movement, adaptation, and care.
Her work explores identity, memory, and inheritance through narrative rather than representation. Instead of depicting landscape as a fixed site, she approaches it as a process shaped by endurance and symbiosis between people, materials, and environment. Sikham, which darkens and deepens over time, and snaah, whose scent lingers across generations, mirror the ways memory resists erasure. Through layered compositions, archival gestures, and subtle surreal shifts, she challenges linear readings of history and invites slower, more intimate encounters with the past.
By placing verdant valleys alongside stark terrains, her practice resists simplified readings of land as barren or peripheral. Survival, whether in mountains, deserts, or coastal zones, emerges as a continuous act of negotiation and knowledge-making. These environments are not backdrops but active participants in cultural memory. Through contrast and material tension, she positions landscape as a dynamic archive of resilience, offering viewers a space to reconsider how histories are carried, altered, and sustained.
Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003, Al Ain, UAE) is an Abu Dhabi-based visual artist and researcher whose practice is deeply rooted in cultural memory, ecological symbiosis, and archival preservation. While she primarily works with oil, her multidisciplinary practice spans public art, film, sculpture, and printmaking. She has contributed to significant projects including receiving the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award in 2022, and creating interactive sculptural installations across the UAE for the Sikka Festival in 2024 and 2025 and Sharjah Islamic Festival in 2025. Her work reflects a dedication to crafting public art that is both conceptually rigorous and culturally resonant. Beyond her artistic practice, Roudhah is committed to education and research. She has been actively involved in developing educational initiatives, including her contributions to 421 Arts Campus and the UAE pavilion in Osaka 2025's public programming and the Arts Proxy Program at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is currently a Kawader Research Fellow at Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, where she conducts archival research on the development of art education in the UAE from the 1960s onward. Roudhah holds a BA in Art & Art History from New York University Abu Dhabi and an MFA from the Royal College of Art.