Protection, for centuries, has existed as both an invisible and visible art, one that women across generations have practiced through gesture, story, and material.
In this exhibition, Hunna Art and Emergeast bring together a constellation of women artists whose works become vessels of safeguarding, holding the body, spirit, and memory. Through their hands, protection transforms into a living archive: a whisper, a prayer, an image of survival.
Across painting, sculpture, textile, and collage, the artists — Maliheh Zafarnezhad, Elham Etemadi, Jude Samman, Shadi Yasrebi, Aliyah Alawadhi, Amna Al Baker, Amina Yahia, Raya Kassisieh, Wafa Al Falahi, and Joud Fahmy — trace the feminine as a keeper of thresholds: between the physical and the spiritual, the ancestral and the contemporary. Their works summon acts of protection born from childhood memory, storytelling, myth, and the relationship to the womb, that first sanctuary where creation and preservation meet.
The exhibition reimagines the history of protection in the Arab and Iranian worlds, from the hirz and the talisman to calligraphic prayers, handwoven charms, and amuletic symbols that once adorned homes, garments, and bodies. These traditions, once both personal and communal, merge here with contemporary interpretations. Each artwork becomes a form of invocation: pigment as spell, thread as scripture, clay as relic.
This visual language finds resonance with the legacy of modern Arab women artists such as Etel Adnan, Baya Mahieddine, and Safia Farhat, who embedded mythology, ornament, and intimacy into their modernist vocabularies. Just as they reclaimed artistic creation as an act of self-determination, the artists in this exhibition transform protection into a poetic gesture of endurance. A gesture that resists erasure, violence, and forgetfulness through beauty and care.
In “Under Her Wing: Acts of Protection,” artists from Hunna Art — Amina Yahia, Amna Al Baker, Aliyah Al Awadhi, Wafa Al Falahi, Raya Kassisieh, and Joud Fahmy — engage in dialogue with artists from Emerge East — Maliheh Zafarnezhad, Hana Moazzeni, Elham Etemadi, Jude Samman, Shadi Yasrebi, Mays Al Moosawi, and Bouthayna Al Muftah — forming a chorus of guardianship and grace. Within each work, protection unfolds as tenderness and defiance, but also as spiritual awareness, a remembering of what Sufi philosophy calls the heart’s veil, the inner protection of the soul through remembrance and presence.
Each artist from Hunna Art finds her echo in a kindred spirit from Emergeast,forming a constellation of mirrored guardianships. Amina Yahia’s meditations on loss and tenderness intertwine with Maliheh Zafarnezhad’s layered recollections, both translating memory into luminous refuge. Amna Al Baker’s embroidered invocations converse with Elham Etemadi’s color-laden figures, each transforming fabric and pigment into amulets of belonging. Aliyah Al Awadhi’s bodily formations meet Bouthayna Al Muftah’s familial gestures, together invoking the ancestral and the cosmic as twin sanctuaries. Wafa Al Falahi and Mays Al Moosawi find unity through sculpture, both artists shaping myth as offering: Al Falahi’s ceramic creature stands as a guardian of imagination, while Al Moosawi’s seashell forms recall relics of the sea’s memory, each embodying protection as devotion. Raya Kassisieh’s material sensitivity finds kinship with Hana Moazzeni’s tactile narratives, both shaping tenderness through touch. And finally, Joud Fahmy’s quiet reflections of embodiment echo Shadi Yasrebi’s dreamlike intimacy, each work breathing as a prayer toward endurance.
As the Sufi mystic Al-Ghazali once wrote, “The heart is a mirror; polish it with remembrance so that it may reflect the light of truth.” Within this light, Yahia’s contemplations of loss, AlBaker’s talismanic embroideries, Zafarnezhad’s layered memories, and Al Awadhi’s tender figurations, bodies rendered with a vulnerability that protects by revealing rather than concealing, become acts of care and invocation. Together, they remind us that protection, whether through pigment, prayer, or story, is ultimately an act of love, a way to preserve the unseen, to tend to the sacred within, and to guard what must remain luminous.
