Shuwaikh is Kuwait’s oldest inhabited neighborhood, its largest port, and a site of constant construction. It is in this dense industrial landscape that Kuwaiti artist Razan AlSarraf (b.1996) spent her 2025 summer driving, and observing its infrastructures, activities and circulations.
Through drawing, ink, and video, AlSarraf translates the visceral experience of Shuwaikh into a layered visual language. Textures of asphalt, walls, and ruins appear in her drawings; ink paintings capture the restless movement of cars, smoke, and industrial flux; and video introduces time and voice, grounding abstraction in lived realities. These works emerge from her process of mapping, driving, and immersing herself in the area, or what she calls a “sweltering drive” through the heat, dust, and contradictions of the site.
'Sweltering Drive' builds on AlSarraf’s ongoing interest in land and abstraction, while marking a new engagement with the infrastructures that govern contemporary life. Shuwaikh becomes both a microcosm of global systems and a portrait of local resilience, where the surfaces of roads and buildings testify to inequity, extraction, and endurance. In rendering these fragile yet persistent landscapes, AlSarraf transforms an oppressive drive into a space for reflection on how we inhabit and reimagine the places we call home.
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Razan AlSarraf (b.1996) is a visual artist, curator and educator based between Kuwait and Los Angeles. Through painting, drawing, video and sound, she reflects on the interactions of people with land and landscape.
AlSarraf received an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA in Fine Arts with honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is the recipient of the SVA Alumni Society Scholarship & Award and Ministry of Higher Education of Kuwait Merit Bachelors and Masters Scholarships. She has exhibited internationally, participating within shows in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, France, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. She has given multiple lectures and talks at institutions such as Harvard University, CalArts, SVA New York, Asia Society New York, CAP Kuwait and Kuwait University, and has curated exhibitions at CalArts, SVA, ArtX New York, GOES TO OCEAN in LA, and the Contemporary Art Platform in Kuwait.
