Alymamah Rashed, the Kuwaiti visual artist, and Zeinab AlHashemi, the Emirati artist working across sculpture and installation, both continued to draw international attention through 2025 and 2026, each building on a practice rooted in identity, material transformation and the body.
Rashed's work threads together Islamic devotional imagery, femininity and the natural world, a language she carried into a 2025 collaboration reimagining the Lady Dior bag for Dior's tenth Lady Dior Art project, alongside a string of gallery presentations with Tabari in Dubai, including her solo shows Mirrors from the Sidewalk and Strawberry Fields. AlHashemi, meanwhile, has built a practice around unlikely organic and industrial materials, among them camel hide, sand, rope and discarded oil barrels, culminating in There May Exist, her installation at Vienna's Theseus Temple, and earlier large-scale desert commissions including her contribution to Desert X AlUla.
Both artists' standing as UAE- and Gulf-based names with growing international followings made them natural inclusions in regional round-ups of artists to watch during this period, work that Tabari continues to show and represent in Dubai.
