The National covered Alymamah Rashed's solo exhibition When My Heart Danced Near Your Mirage at Tabari Artspace's DIFC gallery, running through 6 January 2023. The feature ties the Kuwaiti artist's dreamlike imagery to a specific moment: a spring 2022 return to Kuwait's desert after pandemic isolation, during which a damaged palm tree left with a single frond became a private symbol for the human body.
The show pairs large-scale watercolours on paper with oil and cotton-canvas works, all built from floating figures entwined with botanical forms. Rashed describes sitting directly on wet paper to make the gestural watercolours, using her own body as both tool and subject, and the article links this physical process to her research into fellow Kuwaiti artist Basil Alkazzi's spiritually charged floral paintings. Through the work she addresses femininity, masculinity and the hijab, treating the paintings as a way of turning private thought into visible form.
The National frames the exhibition as part of Rashed's continuing use of painting as a therapeutic outlet, tracing it back to a 2017 assault in New York in which her hijab was forcibly removed. That earlier trauma, processed through graduate study and studio work, remains the emotional undercurrent for the DIFC show and for her wider practice with Tabari Artspace.
