Asia Now

Sana Art and Katara Art Centre are excited to participate in Asia Now in Paris 20-24 October with the work of Iman Al Kawari (Qatar, b. 1973).

In the solo presentation Woven Landscape Al Kawari orchestrates an evocative exploration where the intensity of the desert meets the softness of human presence, and where the painted surface reveals what the fabric conceals. Curated by Sirine Abdelhedi, the presentation suggests a gradual shift from the tangible toward the immaterial. As a prologue, a photographic work conceived as a travel journal maps the territory: fragments of asphalt, power lines, dunes, hamadas, and the boundlessness of the sky compose a geography in motion. The landscape soon begins to transform under the artist’s hand.

Through layers of color, mounted papers, textures, and mashrabiya imprints, the canvases take shape. Inspired by Qatari dress codes, the artist focuses particularly on the ghutra and the agal, whose folds and lines become pictorial language. Driven by the energy of the gesture, the intensity of light, and the delicacy of paper, silhouettes emerge and quietly dissolve into space. Landforms become bodies; bodies become landscapes.

Through a vibrant palette–ranging from earthy tones to shades of azure–the figures dissolve to reveal a presence: that of a collective journey, a transhumance, or a silent quest suspended between sky and earth, where a more intimate territory slowly takes shape, ever closer to the soul.