The past decade or so has seen a concerted effort to retrofit a national art-historical narrative for the United Arab Emirates. It began, as these things tend to, with men—with Hassan Sharif and other members of the Emirati avant-garde of the 1980s and ’90s, dubbed The Five. Only in the past few years—in a belated corrective to the corrective—has consideration turned to the women who were their contemporaries but received considerably less attention. Chief among them is Nujoom Alghanem, who in 2019 became the first woman to represent the country at the Venice Biennale. She is known for her meditative films that sensitively unspool the textures and timbres of Emirati life, and is considered one of the most important national poets, particularly in her then-radical experiments with prose poetry and free verse from the ’80s on. This retrospective, “Unframed,” brought together nearly three decades of her rarely seen paintings, alongside a new series of photographs—film stills overlaid with lines of poetry. These blandly attractive works reminded us of the two sources of her renown.
ARTFORUM: Rahel Aima on Nujoom Alghanem
Rahel Aima, Artforum, SUMMER 2023, VOL. 61, NO. 10, June 1, 2023
