Five female artists explore the powerful relationship between material, memory and identity this November in DIFC.
ICD Brookfield Place, known for championing arts and culture in Dubai, is bringing a thoughtful new exhibition to DIFC this month. IN/TANGIBLE INTIMACIES: Woven Archives, Woven Witnesses opens on 11th November and runs throughout the month.
Curated by Malak Qaoud, Director of Arts & Events, the show is open to the public at Level 1, The Space.
How can we construct the immaterial within the confines of our material reality? What new potentialities break open within these confines? What do we find stored, traced, and echoed, in the fabrics and materials we see, feel, and touch? The exhibition begins with these simple questions. It looks at textile and material artworks as meditative, archival and interrogative. In these works, both practice and creation become active sites of personal, spiritual and sociopolitical negotiation.
The works on display are more than artefacts. They are threaded into material witnesses and living archives of exploration and experience. Witnessing here goes beyond the visual or the intellectual. It extends to ritual practice and bodily engagement, from the burying of fabric to the chiselling of stone.
Meet the Artists
Afra AlDaheri
Afra AlDhaheri is an Emirati multidisciplinary artist whose work explores time, memory, adaptation and transformation, shaped by growing up amid rapid change in the UAE. Across sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, photography and mixed media, she examines fragility and resilience.
An Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Zayed University, she has shown at Louvre Abu Dhabi and Art Dubai, and was a 2022 Richard Mille Art Prize finalist.
Nour Hage
Nour Hage is a Lebanese-British multidisciplinary artist working across textiles, installation and digital media. Drawing on West Asian folklore, she uses weaving, embroidery and hand-dyeing to explore cultural memory, womanhood and inherited traditions.
The inaugural Jameel Fellow at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (2021–22), she has exhibited internationally, including at Alserkal Avenue. Her work is in the permanent collections of the V&A and Leighton House.
Aisha Alhammadi
Aisha Alhammadi is an Emirati sculptor who works primarily with marble. Inspired by Islamic geometry, architecture and spatial memory, she explores form, absence and spirituality.
A graduate of NYU Abu Dhabi, she has exhibited at Sharjah Art Museum, the Abrahamic Family House and Al Safa Art and Design Library. She received the UAE Ministry of Culture’s National Grant Program for Culture and Creativity.
Zainab M AlHashmi
Zainab M AlHashmi is an Emirati conceptual artist known for large-scale, site-specific installations and public artworks. Using natural and industrial materials, she explores nature, cultural heritage, identity and the UAE’s changing urban landscape.
Her work has been shown at Louvre Abu Dhabi, Desert X AlUla, the Pyramids of Giza and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. She has also taken part in the Richard Mille Art Prize exhibition at Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Chafa Ghaddar
Chafa Ghaddar is a Lebanese multidisciplinary artist working in fresco, murals, installation and mixed media. Trained in traditional fresco techniques in Florence, she reinterprets the medium through contemporary, site-specific work on material, memory and architectural surfaces.
She has exhibited in Beirut, Dubai, New York and Europe, including a 2022 commission for the 16th Lyon Biennale and a solo exhibition at Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah. She has also collaborated with Hermès and Gucci.
