My Circular Spirit Resides in Your Land marks Alymamah Rashed’s first solo exhibition in Paris and presents a new articulation within an evolving body of work that situates painting as a site of spiritual inquiry, ecological attunement, and embodied memory. Developed in continuity with the artist’s recent collaboration with Christian Dior for the 10th edition of Lady Dior Art, the exhibition unfolds as a cyclical journey through the landscapes, mythologies, and temporalities of Kuwait.
Structured in three interconnected chapters—Al Arth (Land), Bahar (Sea), and Jazeera (Island)—the exhibition traces a movement from desert to sea, from crossing to arrival, mapping a spiritual and ecological passage rather than a linear narrative. These chapters function as thresholds, each reflecting a state of becoming: birth, transformation, suspension, and return. Together, they articulate Rashed’s vision of the soul as both nomadic and rooted, carried across land, water, and air while remaining anchored to place.
Rashed’s visual language emerges from a dense network of references, drawing equally from Islamic symbolism, regional folklore, and the sensory immediacy of everyday life. The sacred in her work is neither distant nor monumental; it is immanent and grounded, located in fragments of soil, traces of gold leaf, vegetal forms, and gestures of care. Painting, watercolour, and sculptural installation operate as devotional acts and reflective surfaces—spaces where faith and doubt, presence and absence, coexist without resolution.
The exhibition opens with Al Arth / Land, where the journey begins in the Kuwaiti desert. Here, palm trees, humaith blossoms, and fertile soil form the conditions of emergence. Rashed’s figures are born from and embedded within these ecologies, establishing an intimate correspondence between body and environment. The land is not a backdrop but a living entity that shapes, nurtures, and mirrors the self.
In Bahar / Sea, the spirits are carried across water toward Failaka Island. The sea functions as a liminal zone—a space of drift and suspension, where identities loosen and time becomes porous. This passage evokes nomadism not as displacement, but as a state of attentive movement, held between memory and myth.
The journey culminates in Jazeera / Island, conceived as an eternal sanctuary beyond destination. Failaka Island emerges as a site of layered temporalities, where Bronze Age ruins, flora, shells, stones, and human traces coexist. Here, Rashed’s spirits enter into dialogue with the island’s material life, dissolving into a cyclical ecology of presence and return. The island becomes neither origin nor endpoint, but a space of communion—an Eden shaped by continuity rather than permanence.
Across the exhibition, My Circular Spirit Resides in Your Land proposes a vision of subjectivity that is porous, relational, and ecological. It resists fixed identities and linear time, instead offering a meditation on belonging as a continuous negotiation between body, land, and spirit. In doing so, Rashed positions painting as an act of listening—attuned to the rhythms of place, memory, and the unseen.
