Girl Parts: By Aliyah Alawadhi

Childhood is a half-remembered taste: sweet, sticky, and sometimes spoiled. In Girl Parts, Aliyah Alawadhi metabolizes this residue into a language of paint - bodies shimmering in pinks and creams, mouths agape, devouring and dreaming. Her figures - often distorted, gleefully abject, and insistently feminine - move through an interior world that oscillates between the domestic and the fantastical. A kitchen becomes a theatre of appetite; a solarium, a site of gathering and magic. These are not nostalgic visions of innocence but reimaginings of “girl”: an ancient inheritance of edicts around beauty, shame, and desire, rewritten here with magic, rage, and much speculation.

At first glance, her canvases glisten with playfulness: pastel hues, visceral textures, and theatrical bodies caught mid-gesture. But beneath their apparent sweetness lies a reflection on how women learn to inhabit their bodies. Her figures eat, laugh, and comfort one another; they take flight and conjure spells, occupying space, indulging in excess, and refusing composure. Their grotesqueness is a form of release - a way of existing beyond the narrow gaze that defines the “girl body.”

The Magic of Girlhood

Alawadhi’s visual world is animated by the mythical logic of girlhood as a terrain of experimentation, melancholy, and rebellion. Her fascination with magic emerges less as fantasy than as a mode of knowing - a language through which interior worlds are deciphered and futures are sensed before they arrive. The witch, a recurring figure in her work, is not simply a rebel or an emblem of refusal; she is a harbinger, a conduit between what is and what is yet to be. As Hélène Cixous writes, “the witch laughs because she has seen the future and knows it cannot be stopped.” The power she embodies is not one of force or domination, but of deep, inherited knowledge - a wisdom passed down through generations and sharpened by survival. Alawadhi’s use of divination as a symbol is intimate rather than ideological: born of childhood rituals with her sisters, of rain dances and desperate love spells that blur the lines between play and prophecy.

These gestures of secrecy and collectivity reappear in Girl Parts, transformed into allegories of solidarity. Figures are charged with power and influence, and what was once privately vulnerable becomes expansive. Like Sofia Coppola - one of Alawadhi’s artistic inspirations - whose cinema treats adolescence as serious and sacred, Alawadhi recognizes the political weight of girlhood and its capacity to re-enchant. In depicting its heaviness, the dreamy malaise, aching loneliness, and youthful desire that characterize Coppola’s portrayals of girlhood also find their way into Alawadhi’s paintings.

Alawadhi’s introduction to Coppola came through informal digital archives on the internet, spaces teeming with the possibilities of beautifying the inherent melancholy of girlhood. It feels fitting, then, to quote a passage from a Medium essay by blogger Sunday Edits by Ysa, itself a response to Emily Yoshida’s New York Times article “Sofia Coppola and the Sad Girl Aesthetic”: “I consider all the depressed girls we have misinterpreted. All of the girls who were requesting space rather than rescue. I want to stay here because I want to float, not because I want to drown. To take a nap in this interim.”

Appetite and Shame

Food recurs across the exhibition as both a motif and a metaphor - of consumption, excess, and taboo. Eating becomes a declaration of selfhood, a sensual and unruly gesture in a world that demands the policing of appetite: a form of governmentality surrounding the social taboo of eating too much or too excessively. The figures in Girl Parts devour with ecstatic abandon, their mouths open, bodies inflated and distorted by hunger in a way that is both physical and symbolic.

Luce Irigaray once described the female body as one that “speaks in fluids”: porous, relational, and resistant to containment. Alawadhi’s dripping forms echo this idea, embodying a sensuality that refuses discipline. To eat without shame, to be visibly hungry, to ache for nourishment - all become acts of reclamation. In this sense, her work aligns with the feminist reclamation of the abject articulated by Julia Kristeva, for whom abjection destabilizes the boundaries between self and other, body and culture. The grotesqueness in Alawadhi’s paintings is not horror but liberation: a way to inhabit the body as a site of excess and knowledge.

Alawadhi’s work probes the darkness within desire through figures that embody the tension between power and expectation. This tension, that pertains to the experience of womanhood, is amplified by her colorful palette which evokes childlike innocence while simultaneously undoing it, suggesting that sweetness can coexist with revolt. Alawadhi resists singular, surface definitions of beauty in her work. It is not fixed but fluid - at once tender, defiant, and grotesque.

The Collective Intimate

Across her practice, Alawadhi returns to the collective: groups of women bound by conversation, ritual, and shared interiority. Her paintings teem with these presences - sisters, friends, and doubles - who inhabit spaces filled with food, laughter, and secrets. The familiar transforms into something mystical, evoking what bell hooks has called “a politics of intimacy,” where care and connection become radical acts.

By foregrounding these all-female gatherings, Alawadhi joins a lineage of artists who reclaim the private as political - from Paula Rego’s narrative domesticities to Hayv Kahraman’s choreographies of sisterhood and Christina Quarles’s layered bodies. Yet Alawadhi’s tone remains singularly gentle. Her women are conspiratorial rather than militant, their power expressed through small, sustained acts of community.

Vulnerability as Truth

If Girl Parts offers rebellion, it does so through vulnerability. Alawadhi embraces the awkwardness and sentimentality often associated with girlhood, reframing these emotions as strength. She highlights peculiar tendencies often erased early in life, when the policing of behaviour begins far earlier for girls than for their male counterparts. Gestures that mimic the obsessive mark-making of diary entries written in the throes of a new, secret love pepper her paintings. The blurred thresholds between love, obsession, and hatred - of self and of others - materialize in desperate, scribbled song lyrics, oscillations between dark and light, and textural goops splattered across the surfaces of the works.

Audre Lorde, in her essay Uses of the Erotic, defines the erotic as a “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Alawadhi’s women inhabit precisely that space - between composure and collapse, shame and desire.

Rendered with humour and care, her figures inhabit a space that Alawadhi imagines and manifests as infinitely permissible. They are grotesque and gorgeous, awkward and whole. Through their exaggerated gestures and unguarded expressions, they remind us that to feel deeply and to express outwardly can be acts of reclamation.

The Unfinished Self

Ultimately, Girl Parts is a reckoning with time - not as a gentle current but as a force that presses, stains, and lingers. Alawadhi’s paintings refuse girlhood as fantasy, as something pure or idyllic; instead, they expose it as a site where cultural projections collide with the visceral realities of growing up. Within these works, girlhood is messy and excessive, defined by confinement yet overwhelmed by feeling. Girl Parts gathers these contradictions - the desires both imposed and internal, sensations that repulse as much as they reveal - into acts of integration that attempt to understand what it means to be whole.

By Océane Sailly

References

• Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1976.

• Sunday Edits by Ysa, ‘All the Sad Girls Make It: On Sofia Coppola, Softness, and the Mood of Melancholy’, Medium, 2025.

• Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press, 1985.

• Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, 1982.

• bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, William Morrow, 2000.

• Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978.

• Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides (film), 1999.