Artists
Lulwah Al Homoud
Rashid Al Khalifa
Raeda Ashour
Hamra Abbas

© All artworks © the artists. Courtesy of the artists.

Conception & Organisation

THAA (Saudi Arabia)
Hassan Khalid | Founder & Project Director
Jana Malaikah | Co-Founder, Art Operations
Sherif Madany | Co-Founder, Communication & Marketing

Lulwah Al Homoud

Rashid Al Khalifa

Raeda Ashour

Hamra Abbas

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Fragments of Folklore
Critical Essay, Lisa De Boeck (TRIYAD)

Prologue: On the Nature of Fragments

'The past is not a box to be opened but a pattern to be traced.'

The exhibition begins not with a narrative, but with a surface. On entering Fragments of Folklore, visitors encounter an image of a wall: rough and painted in strokes of enamel. This is not a design, not a manifesto. It is a fragment of origin, Rashid Al Khalifa's first painting, created intuitively at the age of fourteen on the wall of his childhood home in Bahrain. Made from leftover enamel paint from a school project, the gesture was untrained but instinctual, an act of marking, of imprinting presence upon space. Layers of pale aquamarine, deep navy, mustard yellow, and muted black move across a weathered surface that is cracked and softly luminous, evoking both memory and instinct. This wall framed at the exhibition's entrance functions as a threshold. It opens not only a physical path, but a conceptual one. It suggests that folklore does not always begin with words, myths, or objects. Sometimes it begins with a gesture, a response to emptiness, a private compulsion to transform the ordinary into something that pulses with meaning.

As Al Khalifa reflects, 'I aim to take what I have learned and look towards the future. My philosophy, as seen in my work, honours certain traditions by contemporising them.' Preserved by the RAK Art Foundation, a platform founded by Al Khalifa in 2020 and dedicated to empowering artists, fostering cross-cultural collaborations, and supporting artistic dialogue in Bahrain and beyond, this wall painting stands not just as a historical trace, but as a gesture renewed through the act of exhibition. 'With change and transition, however, comes loss,' Al Khalifa notes. 'A number of sites no longer exist, and with them, certain practices or traditions have been lost or abandoned.'

Fragments of Folklore is not a presentation of traditions. It is a proposal: that form, in the shape of geometry, pattern, material, and repetition, is one of the most enduring vessels of memory. In an era of cultural acceleration and curated nostalgia, the exhibition reframes folklore as methodology rather than motif. It invites us to ask not what a culture is, but how it is carried: across bodies, across time, across surfaces and silences.

Walter Benjamin, writing on history, described the fragment as a form of resistance: it interrupts the illusion of coherence and reminds us that knowledge is always partial, context-bound, and mutable. Folklore operates similarly. It is transmitted not through fixed meaning, but through framework. It survives in broken lines, half-remembered songs, ornamental thresholds, and mirrored motifs. What holds these fragments together is not narrative continuity, but a pattern of attunement. It is this compositional structure that binds the works in this exhibition by Lulwah Al Homoud, Rashid Al Khalifa, Raeda Ashour, and Hamra Abbas, who each draw from visual and symbolic lineages that exceed nation or discipline. Their practices unfold not as reconstructions of the past, but as acts of reordering. In their hands, folklore is not a static inheritance. It is a generative intelligence. Each of their works carries fragments not of story, but of structure: the golden grid, the architectural shadow, the embossed palm, the sacred mountain, Together, they reveal that what we often call heritage is not what is preserved in archives, but what endures through cadence.

This is where Fragments of Folklore begins: not in legend, but in mark-making. Not in preservation, but in continuity. Not in answers, but in the quiet insistence of form.

Architecture of Memory: Material Codes and Cultural Mapping

To enter Fragments of Folklore is to enter a kind of maze: structured, symbolic, and intentionally recursive. The scenography borrows from Najdi architecture, whose labyrinthine layouts and inward-turning geometries serve as metaphors for intimacy, protection, and spiritual receptivity. Large acacia-framed structures segment the exhibition space, becoming visual breath marks that anchor flow and rhythm. Each frame holds a wall within it, both literal and symbolic, supporting the works whilst referencing vernacular architecture. They echo the logic of traditional courtyard homes, where space unfolds through repetition, intimacy, and ritualised passage.

This architectural logic finds formal expression in the work of Al Khalifa. His sculptural vocabulary translates architectural rhythm into visual cadence, from early mark-making to curved optical reliefs.

At the heart of the exhibition stands Mobile Column IX (2025), a suspended enamel-coated steel totem with a lattice-like structure. Finished in gleaming white with touches of muted chrome, the column casts diffuse shadows and visual modulations as light shifts across its body. It orients without dominating, like the mashrabiya-screen it echoes, it performs opacity as filtration, mediating air, light, and gaze. As with traditional Gulf architecture, it is not what is shown but how one encounters it that carries significance.

If Al Khalifa builds with curvature and light, Lulwah Al Homoud constructs with silence and system. Her visual grammar, rooted in Kufic script and modular mathematics, renders sacred text into visual code. One of the first works encountered, Ayat Al Kursi (2021), composed in silkscreen and gold leaf on matte paper, encrypts the Qur'an's Throne Verse into a black lattice punctuated by gold squares. The resulting composition evokes a labyrinth, its logic not linear but recursive. It does not offer a path, but a structure of contemplation, a visual maze through which meaning is absorbed rather than deciphered. This architectural sensibility resonates with the exhibition design itself, inspired by the labyrinthine layouts of Najdi dwellings.

'My work explores the historical evolution of the Arabic script,' she explains. 'I seek to reimagine these traditions in a contemporary context by developing a new code for each letter through a mathematical process.' Her system is less a translation than a transformation: language becomes pulse, and calligraphy becomes architecture. 'Mathematics is the language of creation,' she notes elsewhere. 'Through this approach, I reinterpret Islamic artistic traditions to develop modern, timeless, and futuristic patterns.' Her elaborate geometries emerge from a rigorous deconstruction of Arabic script, drawing equally from ancient principles and the aesthetics of Western modernists like Klee and Mondrian. The dot becomes cosmological, a unit of sacred logic. In this way, she channels the metaphysical through the formal.

She is also particularly known for her Rumi series, which draws inspiration from the poetry of the 13th-century Persian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi. In Rumi #4 (2020), a mixed-media work on rag paper, layered Kufic script emerges and recedes across a field of measured abstraction. The text becomes ephemeral, echoing the transient beauty of the spoken word. Its visual tempo flickers between legibility and abstraction, offering not a static image but an experience of presence and withdrawal. Her palette remains minimal and purposeful: black, gold, ivory, and blue tones that slow the eye and invite a sense of meditative stillness. In Al Moez (2024), part of her Language of Existence series, this contemplative minimalism meets architectural scale. Gold threads and blue planes become coordinates in a visual theology of order. Like her earlier Cube within Triangles (2016), from the Dot series, the work is not meant to be read but inhabited; its form conjures a spiritual geometry in which script no longer describes the divine, but becomes it.

As founder of LAHAF, the Lulwah Al Homoud Art Foundation in Riyadh, she fosters artistic education and cultural transmission across disciplines. 'Through LAHAF, I want to connect heritage with innovation, and make art a space where the past is not preserved but reinterpreted.' She brings this ethos to Fragments of Folklore, where her works resonate with the vision of the Saudi Year of Handicrafts 2025, not as nostalgic artefacts, but as dynamic agents of meaning, bridging traditional craftsmanship and contemporary abstraction.

Together, Al Khalifa and Al Homoud do not depict tradition; they abstract its proportions, translating memory into visual architecture quietly monumental, endlessly generative.

Sacred Surface: Devotional Acts and Spatial Inheritance

Raeda Ashour and Hamra Abbas approach surface as site: of care, repetition, and reverence. They do not speak in image but in gesture, each mark an act of devotion, each surface a space of inheritance. Dispersed throughout the exhibition walls, Ashour's compositions appear as soft interruptions, moments of pause and quiet insistence. Built through hand-embossing, gold leaf, and pastel tones, her works offer a quiet presence at first glance, gradually unveiling their detail. Upon approaching, hexagons, palm leaves, and calligraphic fragments slowly emerge under shifting light. Her Allah Series (2018) presses the divine name into thick archival paper, while the Untitled Series (2023) repeats the palm as breath. Colours range from soft blush pink and ivory to faded mint and warm grey, creating a whispering palette of devotional intimacy. As she explains, 'I have developed a unique signature hand-embossing technique to celebrate the grandeur of Arab and Islamic artistic legacies.'

Her works reference Al-Qatt Al-Asiri, the intricate geometric wall paintings traditionally created by women in the Asir region of southern Saudi Arabia. This artform has been inscribed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Passed down from mother to daughter, the practice transforms domestic interiors into vibrant expressions of identity, memory, and communal authorship. Executed with precise symmetry and bold colour, the motifs of Al-Qatt are not merely decorative. They are rhythmic gestures of belonging, often improvised yet grounded in cultural continuity. Ashour draws upon this visual heritage not as ornament but as framework, abstracting its forms into quiet impressions of cultural memory. Her embossings also recall the spatial poetics of Mecca and Jeddah, where carved façades, lattice screens, and sacred inscriptions encode theological presence into built form. These are spaces where geometry does not merely adorn but articulates belief, and where visual language becomes a vessel for the metaphysical.

Where Ashour invites quiet attention, Abbas imposes gravitas. Along the outer walls of the exhibition space, Hamra Abbas's monumental stone works encircle the exhibition like a horizon, grounding the entire scenography with weight, temperature, and scale. Her Garden 4 and Aerial Studies (2024) transform pietra dura, a Mughal technique of inlaid stone, into sacred abstraction. Composed from marble, lapis lazuli, serpentine, and granite, these works have a polished, luminous finish that reflects light with a mineral precision. Garden 4 incorporates deep blue lapis, forest green serpentine, white marble, and gold-veined jasper arranged in a fourfold symmetrical composition. Aerial Studies, meanwhile, are more subdued in colour, comprised of pale grey marble, obsidian, and onyx that evoke glacial terrain seen from above. In Aerial Studies, based on photographs over Skardu, Pakistan, what appears to be sacred geometry is in fact a topographic map of environmental loss. 'I've reinterpreted stone inlay to create new sculptures that blur the boundary between painting and sculpture,' Abbas notes. 'It's a visual language rooted in the decorative, but reimagined through themes of ecology, desire, and devotion.'

Abbas draws from a lineage that includes Zarina Hashmi, who used abstraction not as formalism but as a means of remembrance. Zarina transformed geography into schematic forms such as maps, floor plans, and abstracted borders that carried emotional and symbolic weight. Some works, like those referencing Mecca, aligned spatial memory with sacred direction.

Landscape here is remembered, not illustrated. Both Abbas and Ashour transpose place into form, rendering absence as tactile presence. Ashour's embossed papers recreate the domestic geometries of old Islamic cities: door arches, lattice windows, carved inscriptions, and tiled walls, those intimate, ornamental patterns that once adorned courtyard homes in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Mecca. A wall becomes a page; a memory becomes a pressure. 'Cultural heritage is more than a collection of artefacts; it is the very fabric of our society,' Ashour affirms. 'Through my work, I hope to inspire others to connect with their roots and celebrate this heritage.' Her pastel palette, dusty rose, bone white, muted turquoise, evokes interiors once adorned by ornament and ritual. Thin layers of pigment blend with the paper grain, creating barely visible fields of warmth and hue. Her materials, handmade paper, natural pastels, gold leaf, further contribute to the sense of delicate physicality and quiet labour.

Abbas's landscapes are elevated, aerial. In Garden 4, she reimagines the chaharbagh Islamic paradise garden without flora or water, only symmetry and stone. In Aerial Studies, absence becomes altitude. Design remains where narrative has disappeared. These pieces possess a sober palette, cold whites, earth blacks, deep navy, and occasional glints of gold, that together evoke sacred sites stripped of voice. Both artists mine a kind of mnemonic terrain, showing how memory survives displacement. What they quarry from the past is not nostalgia, but structure.

Decoding the Fragment: Folklore as Contemporary Method

'The fragment is not what is left after the whole has been lost. It is what the whole must be reconstructed from.' —Charles Simic

To curate Fragments of Folklore is to curate like a folklorist: through rhythm, placement, and variation. The exhibition approaches folklore not as subject, but as framework, a structure of transmission, a way of shaping meaning across time.

Philosopher Jan Assmann distinguishes between communicative and cultural memory. These works operate in the latter mode: encoded, ritualised, made to endure. They don't tell stories. They structure perception. Each artist extends heritage through form. Their practices converge not in style but in ethos: a refusal to monumentalise tradition as spectacle. Instead, they allow tradition to breathe, through abstraction, care, silence, and structure. In a region where heritage is often codified into institutional narrative, this exhibition proposes a subtler strategy: to treat fragments not as loss but as seed. Not to preserve form, but to rehearse its logic.

Epilogue: The Unfinished Archive

To work with fragments is to accept incompletion not as lack, but as possibility. The wall that begins this exhibition, Al Khalifa's boyhood painting, remains its quiet anchor. It reminds us that tradition does not always begin with awareness. It begins with instinct. With the need to mark, to respond. To transform a blank wall into a gesture. Only later, through reflection, does such an act reveal itself as origin.

The artists in Fragments of Folklore do not offer conclusions. They do not reconstruct grand narratives. They work with what remains: a curve, a grid, a surface, a pressure. They invite us into a different kind of archive. Not fixed, but breathing. Not whole, but rhythmically unfolding. Each artist speaks not of folklore, but through it. Together, these works do not seek to explain. They propose. In a region actively redefining its relationship to culture through expanding institutions and ambitious investment, Fragments of Folklore offers a complementary path. One that privileges process over product, rhythm over representation, and form as a quiet vessel of continuity.

The exhibition itself mirrors this method. Born of collaboration between THAA, TRIYAD, and MIR'A Art, it is shaped by shared authorship and cultural dialogue, grounded in the belief that form can carry meaning across geographies.

This is not a conclusion. It is a constellation. A pattern forming. An archive still unfolding. A fragment passed forward by hand, by thought, by form.