Currently showing at Kuwait’s Hunna Art Gallery is Amina Yahia’s show They Call Me Divine, a phrase that appears half spoken and carrying reverence and accusation in equal measure. With the implied presence of a narrator, the immediate assumption is that the many women who populate the canvases in various states of melancholy are the ones bearing this mystical imposition.
It is, however, the landscape of Cairo, where Yahia was raised, that forms the invisible protagonist of the exhibition, appearing only in allusions to atmosphere and gestures of mood. Growing up in the city, she recalls witnessing how sociopolitical transformations were manifested across the built environment, in public institutions and domestic structures alike. Even in the smallest exchanges between people, these shifts shaped not only modern Egyptian society but also the psyche of its inhabitants.
Yahia describes the result as a field of collective grief — the lingering exhaustion of a city caught between revolutions that promised renewal, and the colonial, patriarchal and class-based systems that remain intact beneath their surface. Her paintings emerge from within that historical fatigue, responding to decades of institutional neglect and pressure.
