Provenance

This (2025) series by Almaha Jaralla employs the chair as a point of entry into the anthropology of domestic life in the Gulf. Traditionally, the ground functioned as the primary surface of support within the home. The adoption of Western furniture in the late twentieth century, however, raised the seated body above the floor and introduced new spatial hierarchies. This seemingly minor elevation altered postures, proxemics, and the dynamics of interaction within family interiors.

Jaralla’s focus on women engaging with chairs illuminates the ways in which imported objects mediated the encounter between local custom and global modernity. Men’s use of furniture often reinforced displays of authority. In contrast, women’s bodily negotiations with chairs reveal less performative, more candid engagements with these cultural shifts. Postures of the legs and feet, or the informal lean of a body against a seat, register subtle yet telling adaptations to changing material environments.
The project is situated within a dual archive. On one hand, British colonial photography in Aden often foregrounded the figure of the soldier, relegating local life to the margins. On the other, Jaralla’s own family photographs capture domestic interiors in which objects such as unused dining tables stand as evidence of aspirational modernity. By excising the colonial presence and privileging women’s everyday encounters with furniture, Jaralla reclaims these images as sources of social history rather than colonial spectacle.

Through the lens of the chair, Jaralla engages broader questions of cultural translation and material adaptation. The series reveals how domestic interiors became sites where global modernity was absorbed, resisted, and reconfigured, and how women’s interactions with imported objects articulated the intimate and ongoing negotiation of identity in the Arabian Peninsula.