Shimmering silhouettes in pinks and creams. Wide mouths open — devouring, dreaming. Bodies lifting off the ground, colour breaking loose. This is Aliyah Alawadhi’s "Girl Parts", her solo exhibition at Bayt Al Mamzar, on view until January 4.

What first reads as brightness or emotional ease slowly reveals something more deliberate. "Girl Parts" turns toward girlhood as a bodily process — recent, unresolved, and formative. The paintings reflect on how women learn to inhabit their bodies, often through restriction, expectation, and quiet negotiation.

Aliyah’s figures eat, laugh, and comfort one another. They take up space in ways that are usually discouraged. Their gestures resist composure without turning into spectacle.

We spoke with Aliyah Alawadhi and Océane Sailly, curator and founder of Hunna Art, about the thinking behind the works and the framework of the exhibition.

— Aliyah, Océane — I am curious, how did you two meet?

Aliyah Alawadhi: It was definitely through Instagram! Around 2023, Oceane, whose gallery I was already familiar with, reached out to me. We began having in-person visits and conversations. After a few discussions, she approached me about joining the gallery, and we both felt it was a really good fit for what we wanted at the time.

Océane Sailly: I remember seeing Aliyah’s work for the first time in person at Banat Collective’s As We Gaze Upon Her exhibition, though I had been following her on Instagram for some time prior. Her work stood out: Aliyah has developed a distinctive visual language, one that is witty and unconventional, through which she explores intimacy, the body, and women’s lived experiences.

As Hunna Art did not yet have a physical venue when we began working together, our first projects took place abroad: initially at Menart Art Fair and in the group exhibition Elles in Paris in 2023, followed in 2024 by Boundless / Binding at Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, presented at the invitation of Emergeast.

From there, our collaboration grew more steadily, but Girl Parts holds a particular significance. It is our first major collaboration and Aliyah’s first solo exhibition. In parallel, her work is also exhibited in our gallery space in Kuwait as part of the group exhibition Under Her Wing, curated by Alymamah Rashed.

— And this is an amazing collaboration. Before we dive into it, I’d love to ask Aliyah about the topics she explores in her works. So, your work explores girlhood, adolescence, and femininity. Why are you drawn to these themes so specifically? What messages do you carry through your work?

Aliyah: When I was studying at university, I was very influenced by the cultural moment I was part of. There was a strong emphasis on addressing broad social and cultural questions through art, and early on, I was focused on large-scale ideas and frameworks. After participating in fellowships with rigorous critique processes, I began to feel that my work became more resonant when it was grounded in personal experience rather than generalised statements.

I started reflecting on why I was drawn to questions of gender and identity in the first place. I realised that much of this interest came from my own lived experience and from subtle frustrations with everyday norms that are often treated as ordinary or unquestioned. These reflections pushed me to turn inward and work from a more personal place.

I grew up in a traditional environment during a period of rapid social change. Access to the internet, online conversations, and visual archives shaped my understanding of the world, while at the same time, I was navigating expectations that felt limiting on a personal level. Those contradictions became central to how I think and work.

Girlhood became the focus of my practice because it was a stage of life I had only recently left behind. It was still very present in my emotions and thoughts. I began revisiting childhood not from a nostalgic perspective, but as a way of understanding its emotional intensity. Rather than idealising it, I wanted to explore its complexity — the restrictions, the confusion, and the feelings that often go unexamined.

I have always been drawn to darker or more complex narratives in popular culture, which influenced how I approached this subject. References such as Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette helped me think about how softness and beauty can coexist with confinement and emotional weight. My work became a way of channelling reflection, intensity, and unresolved feelings into visual form.

As I grew older, I became more aware of how perceptions of youth and femininity shift over time. Looking back at girlhood from that perspective allowed me to approach it with more clarity and distance. The work became a way to acknowledge that period honestly, without romanticising it or reducing it to a single narrative.

My interest in girlhood comes from wanting to examine it thoughtfully and sincerely — as a formative experience that shapes identity, emotion, and memory, and that deserves to be represented with nuance and care.

— How would you define the overall concept of the exhibition? And why were these particular works selected for the show?

Océane: For me, the exhibition visually redefines the lived experience of girlhood, teenagehood, and womanhood through a very subjective lens — Aliyah’s lens as an artist.

What stands out is how unfiltered the approach is to the body, particularly the female body, and to conditioning and ethics. From a very young age, girls everywhere are subject to strong expectations, rules, and prescriptions around their bodies, behaviour, and experiences. This is obviously a generalisation, but there is a global system of norms that shapes femininity. These structures are increasingly analysed across many disciplines and discussed in books and theory, but in visual culture — especially contemporary art — I can’t think of many artists who address this experience with such honesty and rawness.

I see the exhibition as a true lexicon of girlhood, presented through an unfiltered perspective. There are strong visual expectations placed on femininity: don’t be too loud, don’t take up too much space, don’t eat too much, don’t be excessive. The figures in Aliyah’s paintings directly go against these expectations. I don’t see them as distorted; to me, they simply represent lived experience. Women are hungry, energetic, expansive, and alive. These realities are so rarely represented that we almost forget them. The female body is not a perfectly filtered or photoshopped image — it can be excessive, unruly, and still fully valid as a woman’s or a girl’s body.

The exhibition speaks honestly about childhood and growing up as a woman. Even the texture of the work reflects this honesty. There are glistening hues and pastel colours often associated with childhood, nostalgia, and femininity. Pink, for example, is frequently coded as feminine, but in Aliyah’s work — especially in the pink series — it becomes a fleshy, bodily pink. It is used as a backdrop for figures that actively resist soft, passive ideas of femininity. These visual codes are not rejected but appropriated and reworked.

Beyond the central concept, there are several underlying themes. One is magic — the magic of childhood, rituals, and defining moments. Another is appetite and shame, which speaks to control versus instinct. Eating is a basic human need, yet it is heavily regulated for women. There are also themes of safety, domestic and intimate spaces, and vulnerability. Even when the figures appear strong, their rawness creates a sense of vulnerability because honesty itself is vulnerable.

In terms of the selection process, Aliyah is an ideal painter to work with because there is a rich body of material. We discussed which works were essential for this exhibition and which might belong to future projects, especially as new directions are emerging in her practice.

We spent a lot of time looking closely at the paintings and identifying which scenes and groupings were naturally forming. Aliyah also created her own groupings and reflected on the themes she saw in her work. The process felt organic and smooth because her practice already has a strong internal direction.

We also decided to include earlier works, dating back to 2021. That allowed us to trace that chronology and reveal an underlying narrative that continues to define Aliyah’s work. Now, looking at the full body of work, you can see clear development in technique, material, and texture, while certain scenes and concerns remain consistent over time.

Aliyah: One of the things I really value about working with Hunna Art is the emphasis on conversation. Having the freedom to make decisions — even imperfect ones — matters to me. I am not claiming to have all the answers, but being allowed to be a little messy and to meet each other halfway in the process feels truthful and honest.

That approach feels more meaningful to me than presenting an overly polished version of a project shaped by large budgets and heavy marketing. What I especially enjoyed about the curatorial process for this show was how intimate it was. I tend to work better in close, focused conversations and in intimate spaces, rather than immediately addressing a global audience.

Interestingly, that intimacy often makes the work resonate more widely. There is a human quality to the process that people seem to connect with, and that is something I really value.

— I have a few questions about the works themselves. The first one is about a pink series. What is the story behind them?

Aliyah: The pink works emerged during my residency at the Cultural Foundation in 2023. I developed this body of work using a technique in which I rubbed papier-mâché into the canvas to create textural distortions on the surface. I learned this approach from the Syrian artist Ahmad Kasha, whose work is deeply invested in physicality and texture.

What drew me to this technique was its visceral quality, which connected strongly with my own interest in the female body and the concept of abjection. Abjection became the central theme of the pink works, particularly as a way of reframing it as a source of agency rather than something to be avoided. I was influenced by references such as true crime narratives, Glitch Feminism, and the writings of Julia Kristeva, who discusses how discomfort often arises from the collapse of boundaries around beauty and propriety.

Through these works, I wanted to explore emotional extremes such as grief, intensity, consumption, and desire. At the time, I was also reflecting on the socially accepted limits of emotional expression, especially for women, and on the expectation to maintain composure even in moments of collective or personal distress.

This led me to create paintings that are intentionally confrontational, both emotionally and physically. The works are significantly larger than my earlier pieces, roughly the size of my body or larger, and the process of making them was highly physical. I worked on the floor, using the full reach of my body, and that physical engagement is embedded in the final works.

— There is a question I usually don’t like — what is love? — because I think it is pretty to answer directly. But you have depicted love through two works, Love I and Love II. Why did you choose to represent love in this way?

Aliyah: By the way, I really like this question about love! It is vague in a way that allows for a lot of exploration, which I find interesting. Love fascinates me, especially because my work leans into very raw, emotional territory. I am drawn to what might be considered pathetic, overly sentimental, or “ooey-gooey” emotions, and that often makes the work uncomfortable for people from more conservative or closed-off backgrounds. A lot of that discomfort comes from my own vulnerability being so visible in the work.

For me, love is fundamentally about vulnerability. I consider myself a romantic person, but I am also very cynical, and I think that tension creates the despair that often appears in my work. There is a lot of love in it, but there is also a lot of sadness. I have experienced love very intensely throughout my life, and I am still learning its different forms — love between family members, sisters, friends, and romantic partners.

Fantasy plays a huge role in how I understand love. For me, love is about yearning, dreaminess, and emotional excess. The idea of merging with someone, of closeness and intimacy, is central. While I was making these works, I was constantly listening to romance audiobooks to immerse myself in that emotional core. I don’t see these stories as realistic depictions of love, but as expressions of a feminine fantasy of love, which I find sentimental, charming, and important. They are raw and a little embarrassing—and love itself can be embarrassing.

Love is full of imperfection. You argue with your partner, complain to your friends, then make up and sit with the awkwardness of having said too much. It is messy and compromising, and that often clashes with certain feminist ideals that emphasise control and strength. Love, for me, requires letting go of power. It is different from how we operate in professional or public life. In love, you often relinquish control and allow yourself to be affected in ways you normally wouldn’t.

I see love as a very personal fantasy — something you might not fully articulate to people outside that intimate relationship. Everyone’s understanding of love is different, shaped by their experiences and expectations.

I genuinely love love. I love romance and obsession and yearning. Fixating on someone, imagining shared futures — marriage, children, quiet domestic moments — helps me process difficult periods in my life, even if those fantasies never materialise. A lot of love exists in imagination, and I don’t think that diminishes it.

Love can be cringe-inducing, and I find freedom in that. If you allow yourself to love in a way that isn’t dictated by social expectations, it becomes expansive and liberating. It can happen with one person or many, in different forms across a lifetime. That sense of yearning, fantasy, and emotional excess is what I wanted to capture in these works.

— Wow, thank you for these thoughts! Now — colours. I don’t think the ones you use are random or accidental. I imagine they might be very meaningful to you.

Aliyah: This is an interesting question because my use of colour is very deliberate, and it is something I often get pushback on. My background is in animation, not classical painting, so my visual references were very different. I was influenced by children’s television, character design, and palettes that are loud, mixed, and highly saturated. At the same time, I was pushing back against the idea of femininity as something frivolous or unserious. I wanted to lean into that perception rather than avoid it, which is why I emphasise pastels, neon pinks, and traditionally feminine colour palettes.

The loudness of the colour is intentionally confrontational. It insists on being seen. At the same time, the femininity of the palette is central to the work. My colour choices are heavily inspired by shows like Steven Universe and by filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola. Those references shaped how I think about colour as both emotional and political, and they remain some of my primary influences.