Ghalia AbdulJawad

Ghalia AbdulJawad is a Saudi Arabian artist based in Bahrain whose interdisciplinary practice moves fluidly across painting, printmaking, textiles, and sculpture. Her work returns to a set of recurring motifs including faces, eyes, and forms from nature. They are used less as fixed symbols than as ways of exploring perception, identity, and the act of looking. These recurring elements invite a dialogue between seeing and being seen, reflecting an ongoing interest in memory, identity, and the ways a single image or object can hold multiple moments in time at once. AbdulJawad earned her BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and went on to intern at Missoni, an experience that continues to inform her sensitivity to pattern, materiality, and surface.

This influence remains evident in the layered, tactile quality of her work. Her work has been exhibited across Bahrain, Jordan, and the United States, including as part of the Bahrain Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020. Across each medium, AbdulJawad approaches making as a form of remembering, an ongoing attempt to trace identity and make sense of it, even as it continues to shift and evolve.