Dhabia Al Qubaisi UAE, b. 1999
Dhabia Al Qubaisi (b. 1999, UAE) is an artist based in Abu Dhabi who is working across painting, mixed media, and textiles. Rooted in research and lived memory, her practice draws from the subtle gestures embedded within everyday life. Through layered processes of painting, printing, and material experimentation, Al Qubaisi constructs works that function as vessels of presence, tracing what remains after a moment has passed.
Her figurative language resists direct portraiture. Rather than depicting faces, Al Qubaisi renders outlines, silhouettes, and atmospheres that evoke an aura of presence, reflecting on how memory persists beyond physical likeness. In an era defined by the immediacy and excess of photographic documentation, her work asks what truly lingers: the emotional residue, gestures, and spatial relationships that endure long after the image disappears.
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Untitled, 2026 -
Untitled, 2026
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Untitled, 2026
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Untitled, 2026
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Untitled, 2026
Central to Al Qubaisi’s practice is the domestic sphere as a site of knowledge production and transmission. Drawing on narratives of women in the region. Al Qubaisi explores time as both cyclical and embodied. Female family members often appear seated within patterned environments, surrounded by textiles traditionally worn by Emirati women. These fabrics operate not only as visual structures but as active collaborators, forming a dialogue between material, memory, and feminine lineage.
Hands, postures, and gestures become primary carriers of meaning, reflecting modes of storytelling through which women preserve oral history, transmit lessons of motherhood, and shape communal memory within intimate gatherings. Pattern and repetition function as both composition and language, transforming familiar domestic rhythms into a living archive of shared experience.
Selected group exhibitions include Imaginary Museum, Rizq Art Initiative Gallery, Abu Dhabi (2025); Emerging Artists Fellowship Exhibition, SEAF, Abu Dhabi (2025); A Fruit of Sweetness, a Shade of Time, Manarat Al Saadiyaat, Abu Dhabi (2024); Sikka Art Festival, Dubai (2024) and Women of Yesterday, Project Space, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi (2021).
Al Qubaisi was a recipient of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship in 2015, delivered in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design. She holds a BA in Political Science and Art & Art History from New York University Abu Dhabi, with academic study undertaken across New York, Berlin, Florence, and London.