About Artists’ Rooms

Drawn largely from the Art Jameel Collection, Artists’ Rooms is a series of solo exhibitions by influential, innovative artists, with a particular focus on practitioners from West Asia and South Asia. These capsule shows are collaborative and curated in dialogue with the artist.

About the artists

Lulua Alyahya (b. 1998, lives in Bahrain) holds a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her paintings are sparsely composed of dislocated subjects, posing strange yet familiar accounts of culturally resonant archetypes. The depicted figures are often steeped in irony, candid and idle, and situated against nondescript backgrounds.

Shezad Dawood (b. 1974, lives in London) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice connects art, science, and environmental advocacy, spanning painting, textiles, sculpture, film and digital media. Fascinated by ecologies and architecture, his work takes a philosophical approach, asking questions and exploring alternative futures through what Dawood describes as ‘world-building’. His practice is animated by research, working with multiple audiences and communities to delve into narrative, history and embodiment.

Walid Siti (b. 1954, lives in London) works with video, installation, paper and painting. Born in the city of Duhok in Iraqi-Kurdistan, Siti graduated in 1976 from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad and continued his arts education in Ljubljana, Slovenia, before seeking political asylum in 1984 in the United Kingdom. His works traverse a complex terrain of memory and loss, offering an acute insight into a world that, for him, has been a place of constant change. He takes inspiration from the cultural heritage of his native land, crisscrossed with militarised borders and waves of migration. The artist’s work considers the tensions between collective identity, interdependence and the constraints placed on the individual by themes of heritage, tradition, homes, borders, mobility and migration.

Image caption: Shezad Dawood, New Dream Machine Project (Production Still), Cinémathèque de Tanger, February 2011. Courtesy of the Artist and Paradise Row, London.