Hunna Art, Océane Sailly’s 2021 founded contemporary art gallery representing women artists based in or from the Gulf, and Raffles The Palm Dubai present an energetic group of emerging Gulf-based artists, Eman Ali (Oman), Talin Hazbar (Syria), Alymamah Rashed (Kuwait) and Alia Zaal (UAE), who embody a facet of the region’s shifting contemporary art scene. Spread out to the different corners of the five-star hotel, the show presents four chapters discussing the artists’ social, material, spiritual and political research while establishing a dialogue with the Raffles’ architecture. 

‘With Pathways, Hunna Art is kicking off its dense programme for 2022 and shifting from online-only to a hybrid format. It is a milestone for us’, notes the gallery’s founder, Océane Sailly. Regional art enthusiasts surely appreciate the first physical exhibition from a promising and energetic new venture. Make sure to check out the exhibition at Raffles with its unusual, challenging and exciting environment for contemporary art – the show closes on 23 March 2022. 

Eman Ali

Eman Ali’s work intertwines gender and socio-political ideologies to question the intricate Khaleeji culture, societies and women’s representations. She has integrated her practice as a social critique, observation and investigation of the multi-layered histories of the Gulf, the Arab world, and East Africa. Through her cinematic photographs, the artist reveals the untold norms of our society and invites viewers to reflect on the underlying boundaries and systems that govern our lives. 

At the East Wing of the Raffles, Eman Eli presents an installation of her eponymous photographic series, ‘Corridors of Power’, reflecting on her native Oman’s grand development projects that came into fruition as dominating, theatrical and beautiful spaces. In this autoportrait series portrayed in Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat, Eman Ali appears opaque, overpowered and consumed by the grandness and opulence of the space. The visitors are invited to reflect on the synergy between the series and the hotel’s palatial premises and architecture. 

Talin Hazbar

Talin Hazbar works across architecture, design and art to connect with surrounding landscapes and the intricate materiality of the natural world. Through her research-based study of architecture, she looks to redefine material experimentation to better understand the context of landscapes, material properties and organic processes so that they may be both sensitively and functionally applied in creative practice.

‘Stones in Silence’, a sculpture installation created from natural elements of the UAE, nested in the Raffles Club Lounge, reflects on the notions of time and impermanence while capturing the intricate materiality of the natural world and the endless possible collaborations between artists and nature. 

Alymamah Rashed

Visual artist Alymamah Rashed looks into the discourse of her own body as a Muslim Cyborg, fluctuating between east and west. As a Muslim Cyborg, she collides her cultural references of home, between Kuwait and New York, and with the history of Islamic spiritualism. Her work negotiates her female subjectivity, regional folklore, and the everyday banal objects that Alymamah Rashed encounters as well as the rapid social shifts that she has witnessed, such as the fast industrialisation of the Gulf region.

‘My Palm Fronds Breathe (̶F̶o̶r̶ ̶Y̶o̶u̶)’”, exhibited in the West Wing of the resort, explores the sensation of the spirit’s yearning to reside in a celestial home of eternity. This series of new paintings and watercolours converges the sightings of the everyday in Kuwait with her spiritual epiphanies. Each work unravels a vision captured in time that carries on an ever-changing mode of personal storytelling.

Alia Zaal

Alia Zaal is a multidisciplinary artist who explores memory, history and the changing urban and natural environment of her surroundings. Examining the connection between vision and perception, her work often tracks the interplay between digital and analogue. Her paintings are based on personal photographs – of interiors, landscapes and scenes extracted from her visual diary. The transformation of images from one medium to another is seen as an allegory of the perceptions and lenses through which memories pass.

At this exhibition, Alia Zaal presents works from the series ‘Through Her Eyes’, an ongoing investigation of the relationship between photography and painting, as well as new portraits painted on wooden panels referencing photographs from her personal archives along with historic portraits taken at the end of the 19th century, thus offering a new take on the art of portraiture.

Featured image: Talin Hazbar, ‘Dislocated Veins’.