Fatma Lootah: Under The Ghaf Tree Where Everything Belongs

The ghaf tree is the national tree of the United Arab Emirates — drought-resistant, deep-rooted, capable of surviving where almost nothing else can. In 2019, the year the UAE designated the ghaf a national symbol and declared a Year of Tolerance, Fatma Lootah spent time making paintings of it. Not as illustration or celebration, but as image: the tree emerging from blurred, indistinct desert landscapes, layered with print, acrylic, net and hand embroidery on canvas, the surface itself carrying the texture of accumulation. Under The Ghaf Tree. Where Everything Belongs brings that body of work to Rarares Gallery in DIFC for its first presentation in this context. The series moves between the tree and the people who have always lived under it — Emirati women appear in groups, connected to each other and to place through dress, gesture and shared features. The Portrait of My Aunt sits alongside untitled works from the series, a diptych on reclaimed metal spokes, paintings that hold together the personal and the collective. Friendship — a 140×200 centimetre canvas — gives that word the scale it deserves. The exhibition traces a cycle Lootah has returned to throughout her career: the idea that human life and the natural environment exist within the same continuum, that everything emerges from and returns to the earth. From Verona to Al Fahidi to Gate Avenue — the tree stays rooted.