This selection brings together Middle Eastern artists who explore what it means to be a woman through the body, memory, and lived experience. Their work addresses visibility, identity, and self-definition, drawing from personal histories and the social realities that shape women’s lives in the region.

Working across different mediums, these artists use their practices to question imposed narratives and create space for women’s voices to exist openly — in public, in private, and in between.

Maha Alasker is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Kuwait, working across photography, performance, textiles, and experimental material practices. Her artistic journey began after a deeply personal loss, which pushed her toward art as a way to reconnect with her body, emotions, and inner life.

At the core of Maha’s practice is an exploration of the female body and how it is seen, covered, controlled, and negotiated within cultural frameworks. Rather than depicting bodies directly, she works with tension — between revealing and concealing, visibility and invisibility — often using symbolic materials such as fabric, plastic, and organic matter.

In works like A Trap Called the Body, Maha uses everyday materials — plastic bags, fruit, and textiles — to reflect on how women’s bodies are inspected, judged, and consumed. The body becomes a site of projection, treated almost like a product expected to meet ideals of perfection.

Another significant work, The Period Blanket, created during the COVID lockdowns, approaches menstruation through softness rather than shock. Using a blanket as a second skin, Maha transforms a taboo subject into a quiet, intimate space of reflection and care.

Her installations often weave together local healing traditions, botanical printing, and spiritual symbolism, inviting viewers to slow down and reconnect with ancestral knowledge. Maha’s work sits between ritual and resistance, offering the body as a place of memory, vulnerability, and quiet power.

Aliyah Alawadhi is an Emirati artist whose practice explores girlhood, adolescence, femininity, and the body, often through imagery shaped by internet culture, memory, and emotional landscapes.

Aliyah’s work reflects a generation navigating identity across physical and digital worlds. Her visual language feels fluid and dreamlike, borrowing from fantasy, pop references, and personal mythology to question how bodies are formed, remembered, and imagined.

In projects such as Girl Parts, the body appears fragmented, glowing, and mutable — reflecting the instability and intensity of growing up. Rather than presenting girlhood as a fixed identity, Aliyah treats it as a shifting emotional state, full of contradiction, tenderness, and strength.

Across her work, softness coexists with rupture. Her paintings and videos blur the boundaries between private feeling and collective experience, allowing viewers to enter worlds where vulnerability becomes a form of agency. Aliyah’s practice resists categorisation, instead offering alternative narratives for what it means to inhabit a body today.

Alymamah Rashed is a Kuwaiti visual artist whose work centres on the female body as a vessel for emotion, memory, and lived experience. For her, the body is not merely physical — it is a container of stories, shaped by love, loss, transformation, and time.

Her paintings and works on paper often depict abstracted figures and faces, where form dissolves into feeling. The body becomes porous, allowing inner states to surface visually through gesture, line, and colour.

Eyes are a recurring motif in her work, functioning as thresholds into the self. Rather than serving as portraits, they act as emotional entry points — guiding the viewer into layered narratives of grief, healing, and self-recognition.

Laila Ajjawi, a Palestinian street artist, uses public murals to challenge gender norms and reclaim public space for women’s voices.

Growing up in a refugee camp shaped her understanding of art as a tool for dialogue and resistance. She began painting murals in 2014, seeing walls as platforms for expression and social change.

One of her most powerful works is Red Anemone. The mural portrays a young woman holding a single red anemone. She is Rawan Krayzem, a 20-year-old survivor from Gaza who lost her entire family during an attack while they were seeking refuge in a school.

The flower she holds, known locally as dahnoun — the red anemone (Anemone coronaria) — carries deep symbolic weight. Its intense red has long been associated with the blood of martyrs and the sacrifices of Palestinians. The anemone blooms every spring across Palestinian fields and hills, often in areas marked by past battles and resistance. It is woven into Palestinian culture and folklore, appearing in poetry and folk songs as a symbol of love, loss, and homeland.

Laila’s murals speak to women’s empowerment, visibility, and self-determination. By bringing these images into public space, she quietly claims visibility for women’s stories — insisting that they deserve to exist openly, on the street, rather than remain unseen or confined.

Heba Khalifa is a multimedia artist, photojournalist, and painter from Cairo, Egypt. Her work focuses on women’s lived experiences, bodily autonomy, and the social expectations imposed on gender roles.

Trained in decorative cinema and theatre design, Khalifa later turned to photography as a more direct way to engage with real lives and untold stories. Alongside her work as a photojournalist, she develops long-term, conceptual projects that explore intimacy, vulnerability, and identity.

In projects such as Homemade (which actually began on Facebook), Khalifa collaborates with women to visually articulate their inner worlds — addressing themes like motherhood, body image, trauma, and desire. Rather than observing from a distance, she builds trust-based relationships that allow participants to co-author their representation.

Her self-portraits confront topics often considered taboo, including single motherhood and societal judgment. By placing her own body and story within the frame, Khalifa blurs the line between documentation and personal testimony.

Her practice merges documentary realism with conceptual depth, using photography as a tool to question how women are seen — and how they see themselves.