Biography
Fatma Lootah was born and raised in Dubai, studied at the Art Academy of Baghdad, and moved to Washington D.C. in 1979 to continue her education. Since 1984 she has lived in Verona, Italy — but her heart, as she has put it herself, is still in the Emirates. She has been saying this for forty years and showing up to prove it. Her practice moved from performance art to large-scale abstract painting and installation, and has stayed there: emotionally charged, poetic, rooted in questions of identity, womanhood and cultural memory. The palette is vibrant, the scale generous, the work unmistakably hers. She participated in the Sharjah Biennial in 1993, when few Emirati artists were being shown in that kind of context. Her first solo exhibition in Dubai came in 2009 — Desert and The People of the Reddish Dune — and opened a chapter that has continued with multiple exhibitions a year ever since. In 2010, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum visited one of her solo shows and was moved enough by what he saw to gift her House 35 in the Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood — a studio in the oldest surviving district of the city where she had grown up. She works there when she returns to Dubai. Her work has been shown in Times Square as part of the Nasdaq Artist in Residence programme, exhibited across Italy, France, Austria, Morocco and the United States, and covered in Vogue Arabia, Marie Claire Arabia and The National. She shuns the title of cultural ambassador but functions as one anyway.