Artbooth Gallery in Abu Dhabi has organised the Heritage, Memory, and the Body exhibition that brings together works by four acclaimed Palestinian women artists: Rania Amoudi, Marwa Alnajjar, Dina Matar, and Fatima Abu Rumi. Curated by Rula Dughman, the show offers a lyrical meditation on identity, displacement, and the enduring language of the female form. It will be open to the public until 31 October 2025.
The exhibition challenges static notions of femininity and nationhood, proposing instead a fluid, living vision of belonging. Each artist reclaims the female figure as a vessel of heritage, memory, and quiet resistance: a site where personal and collective histories intertwine. Their artworks transcend geographical borders and carry with them the intimacy of home as well as the vastness of exile.
Rania Amoudi draws upon a life shaped by movement and political upheaval to spotlight the resilience of Palestinian women. Her intricate oil paintings transform domestic interiors into sanctuaries of memory, spaces of stillness, care, and reflection. Through detailed patterns and texture, she portrays women whose presence anchors stories of endurance and grace.
Marwa Alnajjar works in oil on canvas, adorned with gold, silver, and copper leaf, to craft scenes suspended between tenderness and trauma. Drawing from archival photographs of pre-1948 Yafa, once famed for its citrus groves and Jaffa oranges, she depicts moments of gathering and harvest as acts of remembrance. Her luminous figures inhabit the threshold between memory and myth, where fragility becomes a form of beauty.
Dina Matar, inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Cubism, has cultivated a distinct, childlike visual language. Her vibrant compositions reframe sorrow through colour and playfulness, transforming hardship into hope. Embroidery-inspired abstractions and motifs from her grandmother’s Gaza dresses evoke rootedness and renewal, and turn remembrance into celebration. Meanwhile, in Fatima Abu Rumi’s realist-impressionist paintings, architectural forms, calligraphy, and textile patterns converge. Her women embody the weight of history and the pulse of the present: figures of clarity and quiet power, at once timeless and contemporary.
To learn more about Heritage, Memory, and the Body, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you may be interested in visiting Refined Compositions by Ruba Salameh and Rooted Echoes at NIKA Project Space.
