This Harper's Bazaar Arabia profile of Kuwaiti artist Alymamah Rashed set out the framework she has used to describe her painting practice ever since: a fleshed body and a second, cultural body formed by the thobe, combined on canvas into a third body. The piece situates that idea inside her wider Muslima Cyborg vocabulary, a biomorphic, translucent figuration built from layered fleshy tones, red fingertips and smeared rouged lips.
The writer discusses a run of works from 2019 and 2020, including the watercolour When I Swam Out Of You, the oil-on-wax-fabric painting I Repeat Myself To Catch My Missed Delight #5, and three further oils on canvas, When I Escaped From The Sound Of Your Hills, Your Body Is Away From Me and Will You Guard My Truth?. Across these the article traces how Rashed renders identity, faith and the body as overlapping surfaces rather than fixed states, with the thobe read as a second skin as much as a garment.
The feature ran while Rashed was completing her MFA at Parsons School of Design in New York, having already trained at the School of Visual Arts and while teaching at Kuwait University, well before her later Tabari Artspace exhibitions such as Mirrors From The Sidewalk and Strawberry Fields, or her more recent collaborations with Piaget and Dior. It stands as an early, formative account of the conceptual language Alymamah Rashed has continued to develop since.
