Alymamah Rashed

Rashed’s notion of the Muslima Cyborg unites the fleshed body, the thobe, and a combination of the two which comes to form a third space – the one that she emits onto her canvas. Rashed engages with the cyborg not as a mechanical object but in the sense of spiritual intelligence, as a motor, or a form of technology, as opposed to artificial intelligence or programming. Referencing late Algerian modernist pioneer Baya Mahieddine’s idiosyncratic form of autobiographical portraiture, her art negotiates her female subjectivity, regional folklore and the every day banal objects that Rashed encounters as well as the rapid social shifts that she has witnessed such as the rapid industrialisation of the Gulf region.