Opening: Saturday 16 May 2026, from 6 to 9pm
Exhibition Dates: 17 May – 11 July 2026
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Address: Taymour Grahne Projects, Warehouse 31a, Lane 4, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE
Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present a group exhibition that brings together five female painters from the GCC region: Dalal Al-Obaidi (b. 1996, Kuwait), Hawazin Alotaibi (b. 1993, Wisconsin), Hayfa Algwaiz (b. 1991, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), Latifa Alajlan (b. 1998, Kuwait) and Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003, Al Ain, UAE). Their practices reflect, each in its own unique way, the conditions shaping a new generation of artists in the Gulf.
The exhibition is accompanied by texts written by:
Afraa Al Hassan (artist and writer), Alexia Marmara (writer, researcher and archivist), Moustafa Thaer, Saam Niami (writer and co-director at Ward Gallery, New York), Salem AlSuwaidi (art curator and writer) and Sara bin Safwan (curator at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and founder & curator at Salasil).
The Eternal Present: Five Painters from the Gulf by Sara bin Safwan (curator at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and founder & curator at Salasil).
There are conversations that quietly reorganise the way you see things. I remember sitting with Taymour in his gallery office, newly opened in Alserkal Avenue, at the early stages of this project, talking about art of the Arab world and our relationship to it. Not as a category to be managed or explained, but as something we both felt a need to nurture. We spoke about the various projects and institutions that platformed Arab art, and acted as our point of reference that have either sustained, resurfaced or fallen away, revealing the tumultuous ground that our world constantly faces. In the past, access to our own history was found in institutions outside of the region, where now that has significantly changed. We now turn to the Gulf, where its artistic landscape in particular, in its very current moment has been brewing for a while. Through its many varied paths, its trajectory has culminated to a point of nuance, complexity and vibrance. This exhibition is part of that pathway. The five painters, Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003, Al Ain, UAE), Dalal Al Obaidi (b. 1996, Kuwait), Hayfa Algwaiz (b. 1991, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), Latifa Alajlan (b. 1992, Saudi Arabia), and Hawazin Alotaibi (b. 1997, Saudi Arabia) showcased here did not arrive from nowhere. Neither did the impulse to gather them.
The history of painting in the Gulf begins, as so much of the region’s modern cultural life does, with an act of departure and return. From the middle of the twentieth century onward, artists travelled abroad to train — to Cairo, to Rome, to London, to Madrid. What they brought back was not imitation. It was fluency placed entirely in the service of something of their own. The earliest works of the modern Gulf period are acts of witness, painters recording a world that was already changing faster than it could be held. The texture of a daily life that the discovery of oil would soon transform beyond recognition.
From those foundations, a generation of powerhouse artists built not only prolific bodies of work but the structures around it. Artist Khalifa Al Qattan founded Al Marsam Al Hurr in Kuwait and configured his own cosmological reference of figuration and nuances of sociopolitical dialogues. Abdulqader Al Rais turned to the landscapes of the rural UAE with a painter’s precision and a historian’s urgency. Balqees Fakhro from Bahrain wove the social and the feminine into abstract compositions of formal sophistication. Najat Makki, the first woman to receive an artistic scholarship in the UAE to study in Cairo, composed abstracted landscapes that evoke spiritual ties to her environment. Safeya Binzager, the first woman to have a solo exhibition in Saudi Arabia in 1970, grounded a distinctly Saudi visual language of the everyday, folklore, and the deep memory of tradition. These artists are a fraction of the masterful examples of the region’s artistic history. The journey of building the arts landscape of the Gulf is shown through the legacy of the work itself, the participation of artists in historic exhibitions, the formation of collectives, and the galleries and institutions they founded, which shaped the generations that followed and made their arguments visible. As we can see its catalyst effects now, the Gulf is home to the fastest rising and progressive arts ecologies in the world, buzzing with institutions, galleries, biennales, grassroot collectives and new mediums. What is often described as the ‘emergence’ of a Gulf art scene is more accurately the illumination of a movement and history that was always in motion.
The Gulf is in constant, perpetual shift – and the five painters selected in this exhibition are inheritors of its dynamism and continuity. They mark moments of a not so linear, at times disjointed change, whether in the urban landscape or social fabric, in an attempt to reconcile with their surroundings and the movement through it. Outside the contemporary sphere, paintings found in malls, hotels or offices often depict royal families, Arabian horses, falcons and other typical national motifs. On the other hand, the five painters in this exhibition have chosen topics of the unseen and subversive; allowing us to understand the diversity and nuances of cultural dynamics in the Gulf. Whilst all the countries of the formal GCC hold their own histories, there is a shared imaginary and identity that binds them all together. We live in a particular experience, where the process of existing and the intimacies within it are constantly transforming with the tensions of holding on to a nostalgic past and navigating uncertain futures. Nowhere else is this more acutely felt than in the Gulf, where the pace of transformation has made the past feel simultaneously very close and increasingly difficult to hold.
Memory is the ground these five painters share, but it is not memory as sentiment, as retrieval, as the soft return to what was. It is memory as material, something that can be reworked, layered, imagined, and questioned. Pierre Nora explains that “Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.” Memory is always evolving, tied to the matrix of remembering and forgetting, resistant to the clean narratives that history imposes on it. These painters reveal their intention is not to document, nor to grieve, but to remain within the unresolved and the uncertain.
For Roudhah Al Mazrouei and Hayfa Algwaiz, the landscape is the primary site of this reckoning — though they approach it from very different distances. Al Mazrouei gathers rocks from mountainous terrains, sikham charcoal drawn from native trees, snaah — a saffron and mahleb mixture historically carried across generations as perfume, as inheritance. Material becomes a reference to memory and of the land itself, functioning as not just an aesthetic choice but an archival one. The landscape in her work is not depicted so much as inhabited, approached as a process shaped by the long intimacy between people and the places that have held them. The sikham darkens and transforms over time. Memory, she seems to propose, works the same way. Not fading but accumulating density. Not disappearing but deepening, resisting the erasure that linear time is supposed to perform. Algwaiz arrives at landscape from the inside — from the room, the doorway, the light that diffuses through a screen. Trained in architecture, she treats space not as a fixed structure but as an evolving field of meaning, perceived, rewritten, and partially lost. Her canvases render portals more than rooms: thresholds charged with what cannot be stated directly. Where Al Mazrouei works outward from the material world — from stone and charcoal and scent — Algwaiz works inward, tracing how the exterior world leaves its imprint on the interior life. Together they map a landscape that is at once physical and psychological, inherited and continually remade. Across these practices, memory is captured between and within imagination; questioning if memory is truly something to rely on.
Perception is never neutral. It questions, who is looking and from where? A subversive energy begins to approach, and they operate quietly, which is precisely what makes them potent in inquisition and excavation. Where Al Mazrouei and Algwaiz orient themselves toward landscape and space, Dalal Al Obaidi and Hawazin Alotaibi turn their attention to the figure — to the body, the room it occupies, the social world it moves through. And in doing so, they make the personal quietly, insistently political.
Al Obaidi returns, again and again, to the rooms and landscapes of her Kuwaiti childhood. A living room with pastel wallpaper. A ghutra left on the couch. Pavement lamps that once illuminated a childhood shoreline. A television screen that becomes the stage for emotions too large for private life. Figures with red-toned skin are painted suspended in a frozen scene, as if teleported from an alternate dimension. Alotaibi moves through a distinct but related territory, an exploration of social norms, investigating how bodies are seen and what visual language has historically been assigned to them. In her Softboi series, Gulf men appear submerged in flowers, blurred and softened, held within a floral idiom long used to encode femininity as decorative and contained. Both painters inhabit a visual language that is rooted and embedded within everyday Gulf contexts through tenderness and soft equivocations, in an almost surrealist sensibility.
Al Obaidi harnesses the archival, to paint one’s own memories with the formal seriousness of history painting, insisting that the accumulation of ordinary days, of objects left behind, of presences that linger after the body has departed, the uncanny figures at the edges of her compositions, slightly out of register and not quite legible, embody what outlasts its occasion. She is not painting what she remembers. She is painting what remembers her. Alotaibi takes another route and redirects the image, placing Gulf men inside a visual language they were never expected to inhabit. The gesture is tender rather than satirical. It does not mock masculinity but introduces a question about softness, about who is permitted it and what it costs to want it. What does it mean to be rendered in the language of what you were taught to contain?
Latifa Alajlan refuses a different kind of imposition, working with Islamic geometry and the gestural inheritance of twentieth-century abstraction. Islamic geometric form, in her understanding, is not a regional signature but one of the most rigorous attempts in human history to reach toward the universal. To enter her paintings on their own terms is to find something that cannot be stably located within any one tradition or geography. The subjectivity she embeds is precisely this: a refusal to be legible on anyone else’s terms. The abstract forms invite the audience to be consumed by the canvas; to disappear inside it — the way one disappears inside prayer or an infinite garden. All our senses are ignited, and the gaze is dissolved entirely, towards the invisible and the unknown.
Across the five painters, the most pressing subjects surrounding the Gulf at this present time converge in a sustained inhabitation of the space between dream and waking, between the imaginary and the real. These painters are not merely illustrating the Gulf, but revealing its complexity through a tender exploration, moving between temporal notions of the past and future, in order to surface something true about the present. Here, the medium of painting provides a powerful surface to observe the operations within the imaginary. The Gulf is a place where the fictional and the real have always been in close proximity. Where cities have risen from the desert within a single generation, where the primordial and the futuristic coexist without resolution, where to live in the present is already to inhabit something that feels, at times, speculative. These artists have harnessed the illusory or imaginative nature of creative work to create a connection to something that has been lost. The eternal present demands the willingness to remain inside the unresolved to make it visible, to give it form.
Whilst the conversations presented here are a mere speculation and curatorial reflection, it is evident that the artists selected for The Five Painters exhibition share a quality that is immediately recognisable and difficult to name precisely: a refusal to resolve into full legibility. An insistence on remaining at the threshold where something is always within the tumultuous act of becoming; it questions what it means to make work from inside a moment that is still forming itself?
What this generation has done with that possibility is to expand the definitions and challenge the boundaries of painting through their cultural contexts. These artists don’t necessarily represent a singular Gulf, but a nuanced one that is free from construct and represents a more reflective image of the artistic approaches and particular gazes this chartered identity can be morphed into, which in itself is an act of defiance and acceptance. To paint memory as material, perception as argument and the imaginary as a method. The threshold between dream and waking is not a condition to be resolved. It is a space to inhabit.
– Sara bin Safwan, Curator
Sara bin Safwan is a curator working in both institutional and independent spheres. She is a Curator at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and co-founded salasil, an experimental curatorial studio. Bin Safwan received a Master of Arts in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy at Goldsmiths University, London (2023). Her research and practice explores politics of memory, speculation, futurisms and built environments with a focus on modern and contemporary art from West Asia and North Africa, specialising in the Gulf. Bin Safwan has curated in spaces such as Reference Point, London; Bayt Al Mamzar Dubai; Abu Dhabi Art, Abu Dhabi; Art Dubai, Dubai; Carbon12 Gallery, Dubai; Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi; and Culture Foundation, Abu Dhabi.
Additional exhibition texts:
Moustafa Thaer on Hayfa Algwaiz's practice
Salem AlSuwaidi on Roudhah Al Mazrouei's practice: The Scale of What is Held: The Gulf, Recontained
Saam Niami on Latifa Alajlan's practice
Alexia Marmara on Dalal Al-Obaidi's practice
Afraa Al Hassan on Hawazin Alotaibi’s practice
