Biography
Almaha Jaralla was born in 1996 and is based in Abu Dhabi. She works between painting, photography and installation, drawing from archival family photographs taken during the 1970s and 1980s in Abu Dhabi as primary material. The images — captured on Fuji cameras, tinted by their characteristic filter — become portals into a Gulf that is personal and collective simultaneously: family gatherings, desert excursions, shorelines before the bridges were built. She paints on unconventional canvases fashioned from Maawaz — traditional men's garments whose patterns originate in Aden, foregrounding her ancestral ties to Yemeni heritage. Faces recede; posture, adjacency and colour carry meaning. Previous bodies of work have honoured her grandmother Shadia and her aunt Seham. The work that followed — Crude Memory, presented under Abu Dhabi Art's Beyond Emerging Artists programme — expanded the archive into questions of settlement, belonging and the physical transformation of the Gulf. She has shown at Tabari Artspace Dubai, NYU Abu Dhabi Project Space, and in Seoul at the Proximities exhibition presented by the Seoul Museum of Art. She was included in the Rizzoli publication +971 in 2025.