Fatma Al Ali, The Tide Remembers What Time Forgot, 2025
Beach sand, sand binder, urethane coating, resin, wood board
59 x 80 cm
Fatma Al Ali, The Tide Remembers What Time Forgot (detail), 2025
Fatma Al Ali, The Tide Remembers What Time Forgot, 2025
Beach sand, sand binder, urethane coating, resin, wood board
59 x 80 cm
Fatma Al Ali, The Cartography of Conjecture, 2025
Ink drawing and printing on paper
Paper Size: 42 x 28.5 cm
Framed Dimension: 49 x 36.3 x 3 cm
Fatma Al Ali, The Cartography of Conjecture (detail), 2025
Fatma Al Ali, The Cartography of Conjecture, 2025
Ink drawing and printing on paper
Paper Size: 42 x 28.5 cm
Framed Dimension: 49 x 36.3 x 3 cm
Fatma Al Ali, Where do borders begin?, 2025
Enforced plywood, reflective vinyl sticker, 110 x 60 x 150 cm
Fatma Al Ali, Of Ships, Sails, and Misguided Labels, 2024
Acid free cotton paper, inkjet printing, typewriting Color Aquatint Prints
Set of 7 frames, 21 x 29.7 cm each (unframed)
Fatma Al Ali, Of Ships, Sails, and Misguided Labels (detail), 2024
Fatma Al Ali, Of Ships, Sails, and Misguided Labels (detail), 2024
Fatma Al Ali, I Read Their Words, but I Heard My Own, 2024
Desert sand, beach sand, sea water, image transfer, urethane bonding
Dimensions variable
Fatma Al Ali, I Read Their Words, but I Heard My Own, 2024
Desert sand, beach sand, sea water, image transfer, urethane bonding
Dimensions variable
Fatma Al Ali, I Picked Up a Coin and Heard a Whisper, 2024
Plastic liquid casted coins coated with Aliminum, and bronze powder,
paper noted, audio
Fatma Al Ali, I Picked Up a Coin and Heard a Whisper (detail), 2024
Fatma Al Ali, I Picked Up a Coin and Heard a Whisper (detail), 2024
Fatma Al Ali, Echos of an uncertain chase, 2023
Lightbox, Composed of 3, 45 x 30 cm each
Fatma Al Ali, Its not easy to persuade Arabs to do this, 2023
Purple and Orange carrot stain on paper
32 x 42 cm each (framed)
Fatma Al Ali, Its not easy to persuade Arabs to do this (detail), 2023
Fatma Al Ali, Untitled (from the Arabian Department Series), 2023
Wood, metal engraving, 70 x 25.7 cm
Fatma Al Ali, My Color Became My Accusation, I Was Misplaced (still), 2023
Two channel video, 5 mins 51 secs
Fatma Al Ali, I Tell Myself I Remember It All, 2020
Photograph from 2001 scanned and reprinted 100 times
Fatma Al Ali, I Tell Myself I Remember It All (detail), 2020
Fatma Al Ali is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, works on paper, moving image, and spatial installation. Her practice is rooted in archival excavation and historiographic inquiry, engaging both oral and written histories to reconsider narratives of the Gulf region. Through a critical yet understated approach, she revisits inherited and colonial frameworks, foregrounding the entanglements between land, memory, and lived experience. Drawing from historical documents, oral testimonies, and cultural memory, Al Ali examines how identity and territory are constructed and continually reshaped. Her work resists fixed narratives, instead proposing layered and contingent readings of history that attend to absence, fragmentation, and erasure.
Materiality plays a central role in her practice, functioning as both carrier and generator of meaning. She works with geological matter—including sand, rock, and soil sourced from historically resonant sites—alongside found ephemera and archival imagery. These materials are not only formal elements but repositories of cultural and geographic memory, through which research is translated into embodied form.
Fatma Al Ali (b. 1994, UAE) received her BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Sharjah in 2018 and was a Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellow in 2019, in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been presented internationally, including at Seoul Museum of Art (2026) and Alriwaq Gallery, Bahrain (2024), as well as at institutions across the UAE including Warehouse 421 in Abu Dhabi and Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai.
She lives and works in Sharjah.
Emerging and mid-career artists thrive on exposure, community and access to new markets.
The artist speaks about her tongue-in-cheek approach to a multidisciplinary practice that seeks to chronicle lost histories and redefine the vision of the UAE’s past from a contemporary perspective.
Fatma Al Ali is inspired by an inquisitorial and academic archival approach, delving into the realms of history, and cultural gulf sociology to inform her work.
The Beyond Emerging Artists exhibition is a staple of Abu Dhabi Art, providing three artists from the UAE a platform to showcase works that were developed over a year.
A culminating exhibition at Warehouse 421 showcasing works by emerging UAE-based artists from the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship.
