A Portal to the Past
Translating archival images into gestural paintings, Almaha Jaralla deepens her understanding of the generations before her, and of herself.
By Laura Egerton
A Horizontal Supporting Surface (2025). Jaralla’s focus on women engaging with chairs illuminates the ways in which imported objects mediated the encounter between custom and modernity. Photo courtesy of Tabari Artspace. Copyright the artist.
The humble chair. A motif so ubiquitous in contemporary living that it is rendered almost invisible. Yet how we sit is significant when considered through an anthropological lens, says artist Almaha Jaralla.
As a cultural signifier, chairs reflect and reinforce social hierarchies, power dynamics, community values, and identity. “The idea started when I did my solo show [Seham] in Tabari Artspace in 2023,” Jaralla tells me from her studio in Abu Dhabi. “Part of that exhibition was majlis seating. A visitor entered the space, and asked, ‘Where are the legs of the chairs?’”
The query opened a new line of enquiry for Jaralla. She realised that the concept of floor-based seating is culturally and generationally specific, and that increasingly the society around her, her own family included, favoured higher, “Western” style chairs. The half-square of seating she had created in the exhibition space to encourage reflection on her paintings—the masnad cushions, the shiny upholstery with its floral motifs, and richly patterned rug—was so natural to her, but beyond her immediate cultural context they appeared exotic and unfamiliar.
This realisation made Jaralla return to the root of her creative practice and look afresh at her family archives, using the analytical skills she is honing through her Master of Fine Arts at NYU Abu Dhabi.
A Lower Horizontal Surface (2025). This series employs the chair as a point of entry into the anthropology of domestic life in the Gulf. Through this lens, Jaralla engages broader questions of cultural translation and material adaptation. Photo courtesy of Tabari Artspace. Copyright the artist.
Family photographs tell the story of her maternal grandmother, Shadia, who travelled across the Arabian Peninsula from Aden via Kuwait to Abu Dhabi, mostly documented through the lens of Jaralla’s aunt, Seham. These photographs, along with her own observations and found footage from resources such as the Sultan’s Armed Forces archive, help her build a narrative of the lived experiences of her ancestors. This shared history is translated into Jaralla’s artworks. The archival images serve as a portal to explore complex sociocultural dynamics, which Jaralla channels into gestural paintings that relay scenes of family gatherings and journeys into the desert.
Shadia was a modern woman who travelled and embraced the new, buying clothes made with flamboyant fabrics and the latest fashions (her daughter, Jaralla’s mother, was the only girl in school who wore red shoes). In one photograph, Shadia cropped faces from the shot—her priority was to show off new curtains.
She acts like a photographer or a forensic scientist in the way that she crops, edits, zooms in, and focuses on some aspects of the image and leaves out others as she paints.
In Jaralla’s painting, A Horizontal Supporting Surface, on display at the House of Arts in Expo City Dubai—part of a group presentation, Still, Stirred and Shared, on show until December 31—we see a silhouette of Shadia seated in an upright chair at a small dining table, turning awkwardly towards the viewer. Her grandmother is in her apartment in Aden. Other signals of her adoption of a Western lifestyle are suggested in her attire: her hairline and hemline, crossed ankles reveal heeled shoes. And yet, as the title makes clear, it is the chair that is the primary marker for Jaralla. “My focus now is on a genuine interaction with the chair and these elements of awkwardness, in the context of the forced performance of modernity,” she explains. Jaralla reflects on the sociocultural dynamics laid bare in the work, and the parallels. “We are a young country, and we are the minority in our country, around a lot of foreigners. You feel the need to look the best and act the best, in order to prove our modernity to the people around us.”
Henna Night (2025). A family photograph captures a celebratory ritual—a South Asian-inflected ceremony in which men anoint their bodies withhenna and turmeric. Through her reimagining of the image, Jaralla transforms a private moment into a meditation on the Gulf’s plural identities. Photo courtesy of Tabari Artspace. Copyright the artist.
Earlier works explored rapid physical change in her hometown of Abu Dhabi. The painting Al Maqta’a (2023) references the bridge built in 1968 which revolutionised travel in and out of the city. For Jaralla, architecture is a concrete portrait of a society. Transformation is part of the vernacular of the group of artists she was mentored by, including Afra Al Dhaheri, Maitha Abdalla, and Hashel Al Lamki.
Also on display at the House of Arts is the multi-part work A Lower Horizontal Surface (2025), which depicts scenes from a family picnic in Al Ain on the occasion of Eid al-Adha. In the source photograph, there is a dining table at the back of the image, but the group of women and children ignore it and sit eating together on the floor. Jaralla has broken up the image into nine separately framed squares, disrupting any narrative or formal coherency. The painted scenes are covered with a gauze on which she has sketched the ghosts of the abandoned plastic picnic table and its accompanying white Monobloc chairs.
Untitled (2022). Photo courtesy of Tabari Artspace. Copyright the artist.
This specific use of fabric is another feature that is appearing in Jaralla’s practice. She wants to create her own language through embroidery, and it is in particular layering which interests her, reflective of the multilayered stories she is responding to. Many of her earlier paintings had as their background the thick, patterned fabric used for ma’awaz, a traditional Yemeni garment worn by men. Here, as she is telling a story about women, she uses a silk that was brought to Aden from Sudan by the British. “It is transparent, very delicate and floral,” she says. Instead of using the textile as a backing material, it comes in front. “I have covered the image with it, [reflective of] how women cover their bodies.”
She acts like a photographer or a forensic scientist in the way that she crops, edits, zooms in, and focuses on some aspects of the image and leaves out others as she paints. She returns to works later to try to understand why she made those choices, sometimes repainting.
Raw energy and a storytelling instinct can be seen in the work Henna Night (2025). It is a rare depiction of a gathering of men based on an image taken at her father’s wedding. Despite the emotional charge expressed in the thick brushstrokes, Jaralla claims not to be so interested in the subject matter, but more in the mannerisms and interactions, in how bodies behave in certain situations. Her work can be markedly abstract in character, despite the figurative images it stems from.
Another characteristic her new works share is a vibrant colour palette. Henna Night is based on an image taken with the family’s Fuji camera, which contained a chemical to make the photos last longer, giving it a powerful red hue. This tonality is echoed in the painting. She applies thick blocks of colour to her canvases, often a sharp blue. In others, she maintains a palette representative of the dusty, faded photographs she is working from.
The final show of Jaralla’s MFA at NYU Abu Dhabi will be held at Rizq Art Initiative in May.
HOMEPAGE PHOTO BY ŽIGA MIHELČIČ
