At the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF) in Beirut, two exhibitions curated by Wafa Roz trace the evolving role of women in Arab art. Women at Work: Intersection of Fine Art and Craft and Women’s Agency in Arab Art: Kinship, Education, and Political Activism offer intergenerational perspectives on creative labour, resistance, and cultural production.
Women at Work: Intersection of Fine Art and Craft
Featuring over 80 works by contemporary women artists from across the Arab world, Women at Work explores the generative space between fine art and craft. Across media such as textiles, ceramics, photography, and metalwork, artists reclaim practices long dismissed as “women’s work” and position them as tools of aesthetic, intellectual, and political expression.
The exhibition centres on materiality and process. Whether working with clay, plastic cassettes, religious fabrics, or soil, artists like Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Maha Malluh, Leila Jabre Jureidini, and Katya Traboulsi use materials not simply for their visual qualities, but for their embedded meanings. These works speak of memory, environment, ritual, and feminist resistance.
Rather than treating embroidery, weaving, and pottery as decorative or domestic, Women at Work affirms their centrality to contemporary art practice. The exhibition also highlights collaboration – between artists and artisans, between tradition and experimentation – showing how inherited techniques become vehicles for reinvention.
Historical figures such as Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, Mona Saudi, and Esther Cécil Bendaoud Boccara are acknowledged as important predecessors. Their legacy is felt in a younger generation that views craft not as a nostalgic return but as a living, conceptual practice.
By reframing labour-intensive forms as sites of resistance and renewal, the exhibition challenges long-standing hierarchies and invites viewers to rethink the boundaries of art and its value systems.
Women’s Agency in Arab Art: Kinship, Education, and Political Activism
Extending its focus to earlier generations, the second exhibition features 50 works by 30 pioneering Arab women artists born between 1905 and 1950. Drawn from the DAF collection, Women’s Agency in Arab Art explores how kinship, education, and political engagement shaped artistic production across the 20th century.
Artists such as Inji Efflatoun, Naziha Salim, Helen Khal, Effat Naghi, and Tahia Halim were not only visual artists, but also educators, activists, and members of key cultural movements including the Baghdad Modern Art Group, Art et Liberté, and the Contemporary Art Group in Egypt.
Set against the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles and early feminist currents, their works reflect a deep engagement with local realities and broader political contexts. Many came from backgrounds that enabled access to education and travel, yet their practice remained rooted in the social and cultural fabric of their communities.
Archival materials and publications are displayed alongside the artworks, providing a fuller view of the artists’ lives and the networks that sustained them. The exhibition also acknowledges the roles of life partners and collaborators – such as Toni Maraini, Rajae Benchemsi, and May Muzaffar – in shaping and preserving artistic legacies.
Here, agency is not understood solely as individual autonomy, but as something shaped by familial support, intellectual exchange, and collective struggle.
Together, these two exhibitions offer a textured reflection on the role of women in Arab art. While Women’s Agency recovers histories of artists who forged paths during times of social and political transformation, Women at Work presents contemporary practices that redefine the relationship between tradition and innovation.
By placing these narratives side by side, the DAF invites a reconsideration of how women’s work, whether in the studio, classroom, or workshop, has shaped and continues to shape Arab visual culture.
Location: Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), Beirut, Lebanon
Date: 3 June till 14 August 2025