Maha Alasaker is a multidisciplinary artist from Kuwait whose work moves fluidly between photography, performance, textiles, and natural dyes. Her creative process is as experimental as it is intimate — she even weaves her pieces using banana peels, transforming everyday organic materials into striking works of art.

For Maha, art is a form of self-therapy — “a way to understand myself, my body, how it relates to the world, and how the world sees me.” Through her bold and deeply personal work, she explores the layered perceptions of the female body, the tension between revealing and covering, and the emotional spaces women inhabit within cultural and social expectations.

In our conversation, Maha opens up about her beginnings as an artist, the influences that have shaped her, and the stories woven into her daring, intimate works — pieces that question how the world sees the female body, and how she has learned to see herself.

— Maha, first, I would love to start with a quick introduction. Some of our audience may not have come across your work yet, so could you give us a short glimpse into your background?

— Sure! I am a Kuwaiti woman, born and raised in Kuwait. I studied industrial engineering there, and in my twenties, I worked in investments for about ten years.

But everything shifted when I lost my dad. The pain was so strong — it felt like my legs were gone, like I had no roots. It happened suddenly, and no one in my family knew how to deal with it. That pain started to live in my body.

I tried all kinds of healing, but nothing worked — until one day, a friend of my sister said: “Why don’t you take pictures? Go outside, take photos of the world.”

You have to understand — I grew up in a very protected, gated world. No artists around, just brilliant women doing their own thing, but not in the arts. Still, I took a camera, went to the beach… and when I looked through the lens, the pain started disappearing. I was focused only on what I was seeing. That is how my relationship with photography and art began.

I started teaching myself photography. Around 2007, I began shooting seriously. For a while, I had two jobs — one from eight to three, and then my home studio in the basement. For the first time in my life, I was saving money instead of spending it.

Then I decided to go all in. I sold my car, took all my savings, and applied to the International Centre of Photography in New York. I did one year, and that is where my career really started.

I stayed in New York for six years. I got a gallery, published a book, Women of Kuwait, and had solo and group shows. But after a while, I realised something: my audience wasn’t in the West. They could empathise, but they didn’t understand. So I made a hard decision — I went back home.

Then COVID came — and honestly, it messed me up. My plan was to build an art community through the studio I started with my partner, Athoob, and save money for my MFA. I was also thinking about moving somewhere in Europe. Instead, I got stuck. Still, a lot of good things happened. For example, I opened a studio in Kuwait called Studio Masaha, which I ran for three years with a partner. It was a photography space but also a community — artists came for workshops and talks. It felt like a safe place. It was all very quiet, private, but warm. That place became my home.

Still, I decided to leave Kuwait and go back to studying. That is how I ended up at NYU Abu Dhabi, where I am now in my second year of the MFA program.

— Since you started by talking about your dad, could you tell me a bit more about your parents? What is your mom like?

— My mom is an amazing woman. Once she told me, “I don’t like feminism or feminist work,” and I said, “Mama, you’re my biggest feminist — I couldn’t do any of this without you.”

In our family, no girls travel alone. My mom is protective — even my brothers never studied abroad. Yet I went to the States.

When I got accepted in 2012, I told her, “Mama, I want to do this, but with you.” She said, “If you go, I’ll worry. If you stay, I might stop you. Either way, I’m not happy — so go.”

I am here because my mom supports me. She knows I need to keep creating. There is always that generational tension — she rejects the word “feminism,” yet lives it every day without realising.

— And what about your dad? What kind of person was he?

— He was such a loving human. But also strict. He had this strong presence. We were very similar — both very stubborn.

— And you mentioned that photography helped you heal after his death. So I was wondering — have you ever dedicated any of your photos to your dad?

— It is hard. Really hard. It is something deeply personal for me.

What I do are doodles featuring him. I think I started drawing my dad because, for a long time, I stopped thinking about him. I draw him as a pigeon because he loved pigeons. And in my drawings, he is always the protector.

— Maha, thank you for sharing. What are you working on these days?

— First, what I would love to highlight is that I see my work as a kind of therapy — a way to understand myself, my body, how it relates to the world, and how the world sees me.

My practice is deeply rooted in rituals, material transformation, and the intersection of art and healing. Rituals are an integral part of life. We are born in different lands, from which we adopt practices unique to our surroundings — inherited traditions passed down through generations, yet always at risk of appropriation or erasure.

In my current installation for Art Abu Dhabi, The Lost Tongue of the Earth, I created my own rituals inspired by herbal medicine and by Islamic and talismanic healing traditions, as a way to heal both the soul and the body.

This installation invites visitors into a protective, healing, and reflective space. It features hanging white cotton shrouds traditionally used in Islamic burial rituals to wrap the deceased.

On the outside, I treated it like a shield, washing it with the leaves of Ziziphus spina-christi used in ruqiyah, Islamic healing rituals. I also incorporated a magic square — one of the oldest protective symbols — a grid of numbers that always adds up to the same sum, believed to hold a certain power of protection.

Inside, the patterns on the cloth are imprinted with herbal medicine through botanical printing techniques, inviting passersby to slow down and reflect on the enduring power of the natural world. The space, though restorative, also serves as a quiet warning — a reminder of what is lost when we disconnect from the environment and the ancestral wisdom rooted in the land.

— And could you tell me a bit about your practice with banana peels? You work with them quite a lot!

— Oh yes. For me, it is important to work from scratch — from what is real, what comes from me, what decomposes. Things I extract, process, and turn into watercolour. That act — of keeping my hands busy — it is therapy for my mind.

I am actually working on a big piece made from banana peels right now. And this practice is also very much about rituals! I have built my own form of meditation — Maha’s rituals. I meditate through material, through repetition.

So I have created a ritual around banana peels. I eat the bananas first — it starts with consumption — and then I use the peels. When they are still soft, I cut them into small pieces and assemble them into longer threads. Then I let them dry. They change texture — becoming tougher and darker — and I work with them halfway through that process, when they are still flexible but no longer soft.

At first, I was making small pieces, but then I started experimenting with new shapes. Recently, I found something — I was reading a book, The Arab of the Desert by Harold Dickson. He was hosted by Kuwaiti families, and he wrote down little glimpses of local life — especially women’s knowledge, which is usually passed down orally and gets lost between generations.

In the book, there was this simple drawing of a baby hammock. Just the drawing — no details about how it was made, what materials were used, nothing. And that image stayed with me. So now, I want to make a baby hammock out of banana peels — for a baby that will never come.

It is symbolic because the hammock can’t actually hold a baby. It is fragile, temporary. And through it, I want to question the expectations placed on women’s bodies — this idea that you must want children.

— 2020, COVID — a period that hit you hard. And that is when you created The Period Blanket. Tell me about that process — how did the idea come to you, and why a blanket?

— I need to thank the curator, Azza A. Elhassan. She took my messy brain and helped me organise it. I couldn’t have done it without her.

The idea for The Period Blanket came from the way we are told not to talk about periods. When we get our period — “don’t talk about it, it’s disgusting.” When we reach menopause, “go find someone younger.”

I live in a conservative society. So I started asking myself — how do I talk about this without showing nudity, without doing something shocking or graphic, which I didn’t want to do?

So I turned to science and started reading about the female body. I took all these facts and asked myself, What do I do with them? And then I thought — a blanket. Because when you have your period, you want comfort, you want something to hold you — a second skin.

Also, continuing with the topic of the female body — two years ago, I did a performance during an art residency in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia. At that time, I was researching herbal medicine, specifically natural remedies for period pain.

I visited local herbal stores, gathered different herbs and trees, and extracted their colours. Then I used that pigment to dye wool — thinking of it as a process of healing, of bringing the body and nature together through these materials and their restorative properties.

By the end of the six-week residency, I created a four-hour performance in which I used my own body as a loom and wove the piece live. When it was finished, I cut it — as if creating a new organ — and then released it, allowing it to exist on its own.

— Now, your work, A Trap Called the Body. I am curious, why did you decide to do it this way? With the plastic bags, the fruit, and the fabric.

— By the way, that is when I started working with fabric — it marked a kind of transition in my practice.

One of the main limitations for me has always been the medium itself. When you talk about the female body through photography — especially from a Western perspective — it is almost always tied to nudity. But nudity isn’t part of our culture.

So my question became: how can I talk about the body without showing the body? That is something I am still exploring — the tension between revealing and covering.

At first, I started the project with two friends, but later decided to include my own body — present, but in a different way.

I chose fabrics that felt like skin — silky, pink, flesh-like, genderless. You can see a lot of water in these photos — it is a symbol of purity, of cleansing after menstruation. There is also a woman wrapped in plastic — a metaphor for virginity, for purity — for how the body becomes a product, something to be sold, something expected to be “in good condition.”

And then there is the connection to fruit. I was listening to a podcast about bananas — how people won’t buy organic ones if they don’t look perfect. And I thought, it is the same with women — the expectation to be flawless, smooth, untouched.

So that is what I have been exploring: the relationship between the female body, fruit, purity, and reflection. Sometimes there is a woman looking at you; sometimes she is looking at herself — like a mirror, like an apple — beautiful, but judged by how perfect the surface appears.

— And you also took part in a project, #Resistanceisfemale!

— Oh, that one was in America! I worked with NYC street artist, agitator, and designer Abe Lincoln Jr. — it was around the time when the Me Too movement was at its peak. That artist has a daughter, and I think that is what pushed him to do something. He was reaching out to different artists to collaborate.

He creates these posters, and I gave him a few of my works to use. He does it kind of… illegally. He dresses up like a construction worker or maintenance guy. Then he goes out in the middle of the night and replaces ads — real paid advertisements — with the art.

I told him, “I’ll come with you!” and he said, “No, no, don’t stand too close to me — you are too pretty, people will notice.” But I still went with him.

So I watched him take down one ad and replace it with mine. Some posters stay up for an hour, some for a week, some for a month — you never know. One of mine stayed up for so long! Once, I even saw people stopping, taking pictures, reacting to it — it was on the Upper East Side. I just stood there quietly, watching.

— Which of your works feels the most important to you, for whatever reason?

— The works I am doing now. And they will keep evolving until something else takes over. I think my work is always a response to the body, to experience, to culture.

When I lived in Kuwait, people always called me “the American.” I guess because I was cultured, open-minded, I asked questions. Then, when I moved to the States, I thought people would see me as Westernised, like one of them. But no — they saw me as the other. The Arab woman. The outspoken one. The exotic one.

They looked at me like, “Oh my God, you’re Arab — like Jasmine from Aladdin!” I remember someone asking if my curly hair was even “real.” It drove me crazy — not fitting here, not fitting there.

That is when I realised — I am who I am. I am a woman of the world. My country is my mother’s womb. Nayyirah Waheed, the writer, once said, “My mother was my first country, the first place I ever lived.” And it stayed with me.

Now, when I look at my work, I see how every culture has its own rituals and habits. And I have created mine. Some are to clear my mind, some to clear my soul — always something with the hands, with movement, with the body.

So the most important work for me is always the one I am doing right now — because once it is born, once it exists, it already has its own life. And then, I let it go.

— Okay, I think I have one last, very personal question. Before we started recording, you showed me a drawing with the figure of an angel — your friend who passed away. May I ask you about her?

— Sure. It is good to mention my work, The Tongue of the Lost Land, an installation that I was telling you about earlier.

At the time, I truly believed I was creating it for protection, trying to shield myself during a difficult period so I could keep working.

But then my friend, the artist Marzia Gamba, passed away. She was only 37, with brain cancer. For two years, everyone hoped she would recover — and then she was gone.

I cried endlessly. I didn’t go to her funeral; I told her sister that if I went, it would mean she was truly gone. But her sister held a celebration of her life in Milan, so I went for one day. I made a small shrine — she was a still-life photographer, so I brought flowers. Our friends held an exhibition; we sat, we cried, we celebrated her.

When I came home, my work shifted. I started drawing again. I began to feel some peace. And I realised that for two years, my body had been holding this quiet cold. I kept saying, “I might lose my friend,” and I tried to see her as much as I could — three or four times a year, between everything. I didn’t want to believe it. Even when her sister said, “She can’t talk to you anymore,” I couldn’t accept it — not until she said, “Yes, she’s gone.” Then I cried.

Now, looking back, I understand that I wasn’t protecting myself — I was making that work for her, even if I didn’t know it then.

— Could you please share a few memories about her?

— Sure, all the best and funniest moments were with her. We were always doing silly, stupid things.

My favourite memories are of her and me on the Vespa in the U.S. That feeling — holding her from behind, the air in our faces — it was one of my favourite things in the world. Just me and her, riding together, laughing.

We had this little tradition — a “friendship honeymoon.” Once, she chose Ibiza because she had been there before. It was carefree, happy, wild. It was our thing.

I am still waiting for her to come to me. I feel she will come as a bird. She hasn’t yet. But she is my angel now.