What shapes an artist’s visual language? It can be many things, but the places they belong to — their sense of home — are rarely the least important.
Zayn Qahtani carries several of these places within her. A Levantine-Bahraini artist with family roots extending as far as Georgia, her upbringing unfolded across different geographies. Yet among them, Bahrain holds a particular weight.
It is where she spent much of her early life, before eventually moving to London — and while its influence doesn't always appear directly, it lingers in the texture of her work. You sense it in the way stories are held rather than stated, in the quiet pull of history beneath the surface. One of those threads reaches back to Dilmun — an ancient trading civilisation that existed between roughly 3000 and 600 BCE.
So this time, we turn our focus to Bahrain — and let Zayn guide us through it, in her own way.
FULL ARTICLE
