Sana Art and Katara Art Centre are excited to present Tied Together: Reflections from Contemporary Artists, a group exhibition curated by Fatima Mohammed and Mooza Al Kuwari bringing together the work of nine Doha-based contemporary artists. Born out of the shared conversations the events of the spring of 2026 brought to us collectively, the show investigates the necessity of self-reflection during distressing times.
There are moments in life that suddenly shift the way we see everything. A loss, a war, a tragic experience, a realisation of what is sustained and what is faded. During such moments we often turn inwards. It is a slow, sometimes tender, and sometimes a difficult process of inspection: looking at oneself and pondering what really matters. This exhibition is dedicated to that self-reflection as a necessary response to adapt to new norms. Presenting the work of Shima Ainehdar, Noora Al Hardan, Mooza Al Kuwari, Noora Al Melhim, Zainab Al Shibani, Maryam AlTajer, Wurood Azzam, Gigi, and Almaha Nasser, the exhibition Tied Together looks at the difficult, self-reflective moments of our lives: some hopeful, some cautious, all united by a sense of camaraderie.
For several artists in this show self-reflection translates to self-inspection marked by a period of quietness. In her monochrome and atmospheric drawing What Was Never Fully Felt (2023) Maryam Altajer looks at the lifespan of emotions. Feelings often arrive vivid and total but fade away with time and become residue. Altajer’s inquiry probes an occasion where the complexity of the feeling remains unresolved but is absorbed into the surface becoming illegible yet present and somehow still shaping us from beneath. Through gestural looseness the resulting work moves airily from density to dissolution while creating a breathing rhythm across the surface.
The agony of self-reflection, for Wurood Azzam, is an emotional one. In The Walls Azzam depicts the lowest point of an emotional struggle. A curled figure is overwhelmed by the weight of their thoughts and emotions, residing in a self-made prison, a box whose boundaries connect directly to the head and the feet. The connectedness symbolises Azzam’s thesis that confinement, often, both begins and ends within oneself.
In addition to discussing grief and torment thematically, artists such as Shima Ainehdar turned them to a methodology. While dealing with deep sorrow, for 13 days Ainehdar returned to the same cluster of leaves, photographing and drawing them as they slowly shifted through light, weather, and time. This approach became a ritual, an attempt to sit with time marked by grief. Through such a ritualistic process, each image came to carry a different emotional weight, and together the pieces form a record of tension between permanence and grief.
Noora Al Hardan presents a series of three paintings based on a methodological approach of her daily walks around Doha. Traces of Residual Light embody scenes Al Hardan has photographed during these walks, exploring architecture as a vessel for memory and using line drawings of architectural details layered with gradients inspired by light leaks. Her methodology, similarly to Ainehdar’s, functions as an antidote to the shared grievances reminding us of the familiar elements around us as fragments and traces of the past.
Gigi’s work attends to the psychological weight of a world in flux. Working through dream logic, staged environments, and personal symbolism, she maps the disorienting process of turning inwards when the self shifts and renegotiates as the ground beneath us moves. Her paintings locate the precise, fragile threshold where childhood innocence meets the friction of growing up: not a clean passage but a collision, tender and unresolved. Into this space she brings absurdity and gentle humour, holding them against the weight of introspection as a form of survival—an invitation to look inward together, sustained by shared intuition and emotional solidarity.
In their quests for self-reflection some artists turned to expressions of solidarity. With a practice rooted in exploring organic forms, Mooza Al Kuwari presents a number of drawings and paintings navigating between the concepts of shelter and resilience. Working exclusively with natural, flowing lines in order to keep her work close to the rhythms and textures of the natural world Al Kuwari articulates the sentiments felt by many during the spring of 2026—an unwavering sense of unity and togetherness. Almaha Nasser’s painting Rooted in Time echoes the same feeling reflecting the enduring presence of the date palm, a symbol of resilience, heritage, and continuity. Standing firmly in the desert landscape, the tree embodies the stories, traditions, and memories that remain deeply connected to the land across generations. This familiar utterance of solidarity also plays a central role in Zainab Al Shibani’s artworkTied Together displaying ‘comrades in arms’, two female figures tied together from their long ponytails, echoing esprit de corps while maintaining a degree of sobriety associated with regional tension.
While many artists in the show are responding to the tumultuous regional political landscape, others such as Noora Al Melhim drew inspiration from more personal experiences. Al Melhim’s hand-painted ceramic vessel is inspired by motherhood and the transformative experience of giving birth. The work reflects the emotional and personal changes that occur after welcoming new life into the world, echoing a gentle sentiment of hope and continuity among all the tension and violence.
