Across mediums and geographies, the following practices take on questions of ecology, power, and cultural memory, revealing how artistic imagination becomes a site of continuity and reinvention.

Souad Abdelrasoul

Gallery Misr, Cairo

Cairo-based multimedia artist Souad Abdelrasoul paints mostly human figures that appear to be on the precipice of transformation: they fracture, mutate new eyes, or dissolve into a giant mouth. Sometimes they are further along – as with a sapling growing from uterine walls or bird-like with a human head. In the painting series ‘Psycho-Maps and Metaphysical Bodies’, the female body becomes a symbolic cartographic canvas to explore myth, memory, and the metaphysical relationship between women and the natural environment. Are we becoming nonhuman, or are plants and animals becoming us? In Abdelrasoul’s darkly surreal paintings, it is hard to tell.

Aiza Ahmed

Sargent’s Daughters, New York

Theater is a verb before it is a noun, as Martha Graham once said, and the same sensibility underwrites Aiza Ahmed’s multidisciplinary practice. Her works have the feeling of a stage set, scaffolded with narratives of migration and personal archives to unpick diasporic South Asian identity. It is an especially pertinent topic in Qatar, and fittingly all works were made in situ while in residence at Doha’s Fire Station contemporary art space. In Footnotes (2025), Ahmed extends her engagement with the jingoistic pageantry of daily military ceremonies on the Wagah-Attari border between India and Pakistan. Wooden cutouts of soldiers reenact a goofy, ritualized dance as translucent muslin paintings hint at specters of animosities past.

Bouthayna Al Muftah

al markhiya gallery, Doha

Heritage speaks in Bouthayna Al Muftah’s practice, which sutures traditional folkways and their contemporary interpretations through an unbroken thread of Qatari identity. The artist is known for her printmaking, drawings, and performances that unspool cultural memory. On view at Art Basel Qatar, the installation Lailat Khamees (Thursday Night) (2025) captures an intimate experience that is at once universal – women dressing up together before the weekend – and deeply specific to place. The installation’s centerpiece is a thobe, a traditional Qatari garment, here made of natural materials that maintain an ancestral connection to land. Surrounding it are inherited ornaments. Taken together, the installation represents the fragility (and strength) of familial and cultural memory in a globalized age.

Caline Aoun

Marfa’ Projects, Beirut

Ink, paper, and pixels keep the score in Caline Aoun’s examinations of data, temporality, and the urban environment. The Beirut-born artist’s multivalent practice hinges on pausing the flow of time or information to render the intangible sensible, if only briefly. Inspired by the work of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, ‘Dreaming of Electric Dew’ (2023–2025) sees pastel-colored metallic monochromes gently sweat with artificial condensation. And in the ongoing series ‘Measuring Entropy’, paper pulp cast on the ground outside her studio in the Lebanese mountains indexes natural cycles by capturing the shedding of pine needles, like animal tracks in fresh cement. Together, they point to the dangers of biomimicry: By imitating nature, technology risks making it altogether obsolete.

Nadia Ayari 

Selma Feriani, London and Tunis

In Nadia Ayari’s distinctive paintings, spiky, space-age blooms based on Tunisian jasmines and lip-like leaves float against saturated 1980s hues. Only on closer inspection does the artist’s use of impasto become apparent – her meticulous and layered brushwork gives the canvases a tactile, velvety effect. Stylized flowers dangle from tubular geometric stems, suggesting landing craft approaching terminal velocity. Collapsing figuration and abstraction, these floral motifs evoke a survival drive that is necessarily multispecies and posthuman.

Lina Gazzaz

Hafez Gallery, Jeddah and Riyadh

There is a certain mycelial sensitivity that suffuses Lina Gazzaz’s practice, from her earliest Islamic paintings through to more recent multimedia installations that index the urban development and transformations of her native Saudi Arabia. In the installation Tracing Lines of Growth (2024), silken black and red threads wrap around leaves and spider across the trunks of disassembled and reconstructed palm trees before unraveling to the floor like an unstrung harp. The desiccated tree’s vascular networks pulse like filamentous information highways. There is a sense of a graphic score that charts not just water and sap, but also the passage of time. The negative space surrounding them is very loud.

Maryam Hoseini

Green Art Gallery, Dubai

Fragmented, ruptured bodies and motifs multiply across Tehran-born, New York-based Maryam Hoseini’s paneled canvases. They contain themselves, yet remain liminal, mutable, and infinitely reconfigurable. They are at once architectural and impossible, in an Escherian way. This new suite of paintings, called ‘Bodies Do Not Resolve’, draws upon a cosmological text by 13th-century polymath Zakariya al-Qazwini to think through the contemporary condition. Swathes of checkerboard tiling suggest floors, but it is never quite clear which way is up. In the artist’s oeuvre, becoming is revealed to be a perpetual process and never a destination.

Mohamed Monaiseer 

Gypsum Gallery, Cairo 

In Egyptian artist Mohamed Monaiseer’s practice, repetition becomes ritual. It renders the immaterial visible through embroidered and painted textile works that draw from heritage craft. The transcendental and mystical themes of earlier works have recently given way to the invisible legacies of colonialism and their instrumentalization as constructors of cultural memory. In the ongoing series ‘I, Pet Lion’ (2024–2025), Monaiseer considers, in embroidered and painted textiles, the imbrication of war in everyday life and the way its visual language pervades everything from flags to children’s board games. Displayed like a military museum, chessboard grids are embellished like an evening purse, all watched over by heraldic animals. Sometimes glorification and protection amount to the same thing. 

Nida Sinnokrot

carlier gebauer, Berlin and Madrid

Artist and educator Nida Sinnokrot’s practice germinates from the core belief that there can be no sustainable technology without sustainable mythology, without the inherited cosmologies and rituals that mortar socioecological life. Through film and installation, he uncoils the tessellation of power, knowledge, and infrastructures of control through a methodology – porous, participatory – he calls Ephemeral Infrastructure. In the installation Water Witness (2025), totemic sculptures are bricolaged from stacked stoneware, steel pipes, irrigation valves, and other scavenged objects. Like the talismanic Palestinian amulets they invoke, they stand sentinel on Art Basel Qatar’s fair floor; part witness, part warning.