Alla Abdunabi's practice explores the material afterlives of objects through a mode of storytelling that merges the auto-ethnographical, historical, and fictional. Positioned at the intersection of material culture and the natural world, she examines how nature is mobilised to construct political and social narratives. This often begins as a tactile engagement with an object, which evolves, inevitably, into a negotiation with its narrative construction. Naturally, her position within the Libyan diaspora, and her movements between the global North and South, inform this inquiry, mirroring the shifting trajectories of the objects and histories she engages.
Alla Abdunabi (b. 2001, Freiburg) has participated in residencies and development programmes including the Artists Intensive Study Programme (AISP) at Fire Station, Doha (2025), the Artists in Residence programme at Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation (2025), the Artistic Development Program at 421, Abu Dhabi (2024), and the Guest Residence at Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai (2023). In 2025, she presented her solo exhibition Are your memories of me enough for you? at 421, Abu Dhabi, and was among the artists presented in Beyond Emerging Artists at Abu Dhabi Art.
Her selected group exhibitions include Made With Your Magic, Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, KSA (forthcoming); Fire Station Museum, Doha, Qatar (forthcoming); Made With Your Magic, Beirut Art Centre, Beirut, Lebanon (2026); Made With Your Magic, Dream City Festival, L’art Tunisie, Tunisia (2025); Beyond: Emerging Artists, Abu Dhabi Art, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2025) and Bygones, The Project Space, NYUAD Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2025) among others.
Artist Alla Abdunabi shares her experience of the Artists Intensive Study Programme at the Fire Station in Doha and how living in the city is inspiring a new body of work.
Alla Abdunabi’s In the Stomach of the Earth reconstructs a Roman vivarium from ancient Apollonia, Libya, reflecting on the shifting relationship between humans, the sea, containment, and the passage of time.
Melissa Gronlund reviews Made With Your Magic.
A new wave of Libyan creatives is reshaping the country’s cultural identity.
In her exhibition Are your memories of me enough for you? at 421 Arts Campus in Abu Dhabi, Alla Abdunabi explores the lion as a symbol of colonial exploitation and control.
Alla Abdunabi's sculptural interrogation of colonial memory preserves the past and questions the present. Brendon Bell-Roberts visits 421 as Abdunabi shares personal insights into her latest body of work.
Abdunabi examines the concept of false resemblance, questioning how truth is constructed and how objects shape specific versions of reality through their symbols.
