This conversation is an unfolding catch-up conversation between Aliyah AlAwadhi & Moza Almatrooshi. Questions of magic, girlhood, and the grotesque open into a shared space of dissecting expressions of memory. Speaking of witches & sisters, vulnerability & beauty, politics & collectivity, Aliyah and Moza wander through themes that feel at once intimate and expansive.
MM: One of the things we were somewhat robbed of when we first met (in 2021) is that we didn’t really get into the deeper questions: why you practice the way you do, how certain thematics sustain themselves or elongate, or where you decide to let others drop. These things come through in your work, but I think it’s valuable to articulate them. So instead of asking the clichéd “how did it start,” I want to begin with this: what stories first gave you wonder, the ones you later framed in your artworks?
AA: I agree that starting “at the beginning” isn’t useful. Everyone’s beginning is muddled. It takes time to even realize what you’re doing as an artist. For me, there are a few threads I keep returning to.
Grotesque & Bodily Autonomy
One is gender. My experience of growing up femme-coded shaped me profoundly. I was surrounded by people of varied gender expressions, which made me attuned to fluidity, but also to the gender-based traumas and fantasies that form us in presently dominant contexts.
Another is magic and fantasy. By fantasy I mean power fantasy: the ability to conjure, influence, make things appear. I’m drawn to the witch figure, to femininity coded as deceitful. I reclaim those connotations as power. Female dominance, sexuality, girlhood, they all play into this.
Magic came to me first through media; Matilda, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, The Craft. They were formative references, even though overwhelmingly white. Part of being an artist is remaking those influences into realities closer to your own. My sister was also a major influence; she was immersed in Wicca, and I remember us doing rain dances together and trying to levitate. That sense of sorority, of magic created in the absence of masculinity, continues to resonate. Not from misandry, but from wanting to imagine women outside those lenses.
So when I think of magic, I also think of utopian femme societies, of collective fantasies. That’s why multiple female figures appear in my paintings. It’s about magic as empowerment, but also as transgression: the deceptive female, the virginal symbol, the grotesque, the abject.
Another strand of my work is exaggeration of the female form into grotesqueness and using abjectness as a way to explore bodily autonomy. This began during my “pink paintings” period, with stark white figures against pink grounds. For me, grotesqueness creates freedom. The freedom of being ugly, of being perceived outside the frame of attraction. But beauty discourse frustrates me. It always stops at “everyone’s beautiful.” Why does everything have to be pretty to matter? Why does beauty deserve preservation more than anything else? I want to move beyond that. For me, grotesqueness is a way out of the trap of beauty’s binary.
Age, Thresholds & Fantasy
MM: You mentioned earlier the role of age. How do you see that shaping your work now?
AA: Growing older has definitely shifted my perspective. I turn 29 tomorrow, and approaching 30 feels like a threshold. Socially, it’s treated as such a big deal, especially for women, but what frustrates me is how quickly the conversation reduces to looks: “Oh, you don’t look 30.” That’s not the point.
When I was younger, especially during SEAF, (Sheikha Salama Emerging Artist Fellowship), I was told that exploring ideas too broadly could leave me lost, and that focusing on what’s directly meaningful can be more powerful. I’ve taken that on. My current work still carries commentary on the range of gender expression, but I now draw from more personal reservoirs: my upbringing in a strict, isolated household, gender essentialism I grew up with. I make art less to “empower” others, more to comfort myself and expand my own sense of possibility.
MM: When you speak about empowerment, I sense your hesitation. It feels like the word has been captured by advertisements and slogans.
AA: Exactly. Empowerment has become a throwaway word. “Red lipstick is empowering.” That’s not what I’m doing. My work isn’t about neat positions of power; it’s about vulnerability and complexity.
A lot of my practice is tied to vulnerability, self-pity, raw emotion, being cringey, indulging in fantasy. Fantasy is excessive, awkward, even embarrassing. But I lean into that. Vulnerability isn’t weakness. It’s truth.
I’ve lived in positions where my self-worth was tied to being attractive to men, or where I wanted to submit to a man. Liberal feminism often dismisses that because it doesn’t fit the “strong woman” narrative. But those contradictions are real. I’m not afraid to acknowledge them.
MM: That reminds me of Audre Lorde’s writing on the erotic; not erotic for its own sake, but as a source of power beyond the demonized gaze. When you describe your work, I see that: eroticism that isn’t objectified, but embodied.
AA: Yes. The problem with mainstream feminist discourse is that it flattens experience, demanding we speak only from strength. But I want to explore my contradictions: submission alongside dominance, beauty alongside grotesque, fantasy alongside vulnerability. These are all parts of being human, and part of why I make art is to give space to that full range.
MM: To return to beauty and the grotesque: how do you position yourself inside that dichotomy?
AA: I don’t actually experience my work as grotesque from within. If I truly found something grotesque, I wouldn’t make it. When I use the word, it’s more from a third-person perspective. I find joy in “ugly beauty”, in slimy, liquid, bodily textures that others might label abject. To me, they’re beautiful.
It’s like how women see freedom and bodily autonomy in unruly hair, unshaven legs, or sun-browned skin. Not conventionally beautiful, but there’s still beauty. Where beauty or grotesqueness lies depends on perspective and whether it’s filtered through conventional standards.
I’m frustrated with those standards because I rarely see what I personally find beautiful. So I create it myself. Even in “alternative” circles, it’s hard to fully relinquish pre-scripted femininity. My practice is individualist. I make images I find beautiful, even knowing others may call them grotesque.
MM: Your visual expression has become popular and recognisable. When one of your paintings is collected, do you usually speak with the collector?
AA: No, not really. That’s how the art world works. People often buy through intermediaries, so I rarely know who they are. At fairs, someone might approach me and say, “I collected your work.” It feels like when a distant relative says, “I changed your diapers.” There’s no shared memory, nothing to attach a conversation to.
In the Khaleej, I’ve noticed this dynamic: publicly, institutions project a polished face. Grand art fairs, dazzling installations, the same handful of institutionally validated artists showcased for nation-building. But parallel to that, there’s a quieter circuit.
Many people in the art world are “alternative” in some way. In private, there’s a sort of hush-hush collecting, a way of saying, “I agree with what you’re doing, but I can’t say it in public.” In a restrictive social environment, collecting behind closed doors becomes a form of validation.
My own work isn’t contrived to stereotype what an “Emirati woman” is. I paint what I know: childhood, strict households, gendered experiences. And yet people across the region connect with it, even if it isn’t often shown publicly or validated institutionally.
MM: You’re still able to sustain your practice because there’s not only interest, but a kind of resonance it creates with people. For me, this question stems from whether or not you communicate with your collectors. I’m totally projecting here as an artist with a social practice. I constantly engage with the public directly and often watch my work disappear within an hour, especially with food. There’s urgency in planting those seeds and seeing how people respond. But in your case, you don’t have to plant seeds in the same way. Your work responds to collective experiences: feminism, patriarchy, living collectively, and also the pull of individualism. We’re all navigating what’s happening in the world now, and it feels both shared and fragmented.
As an artist working within these times, how much do you see your work responding not just to past experiences but also to the ongoing, rolling present, which can be just as distressing? It’s a constant shifting of sands.
AA: I think because of my age, my work is very much stuck in the past and in fantasy. I carry a desire to regain lost time and lost opportunities, to express what I couldn’t before. My current explorations remain mostly within girlhood and young women.
I believed for a long time that once I exhausted that chapter, I’d move on. But life shows you otherwise. Events happen that force you to recognise you’ve shifted as a person. Suddenly you realise you’re not who you were five years ago.
I definitely feel like I’ve had one of those moments. Realising I know myself more deeply. Maybe that’s just frontal lobe development, maybe maturity. But I’ve found myself looking back and thinking: I’m a culmination of these past ten years. This is what I’m interested in. This is what I’ll carry into the next chapter.
Right now, I feel awash in a melancholic nostalgia for a past that never really existed.
My practice is individualistic, but as a person, I crave connection. All the conversations about what’s happening in the world, those happen in groups. I try to say yes when I’m invited to gatherings because I want to reconnect, to talk about things that matter. Online, everything feels muddled and frustrating. Together, it feels like we’re all in this mess collectively, and that sense of being in it together matters. My work still lives in an inner world, but I imagine that one day, when another “grown-up moment” hits, I’ll feel the inclination to integrate more with the outside world.
MM: You know, I really do believe in the magical moment of turning 30. Things shift. As a 34-year-old, I can tell you I’ve heard it from many people, and I’ve experienced it myself. There’s something magnetic about the crossing from your twenties into your thirties. Saturn’s return, yes, but also the reshuffle it brings. The “moral-of-the-story” that you have to absorb the lessons before moving into the next chapter.
And to your point about getting tangled up with the dichotomies of participation in collective moments demanding care and attention, I recall an artist I met in grad school saying that her work wasn’t political. At first I was disappointed. But then I had to reflect on her adamance, her refusal to label it so. She leaned fully into fantasy, into literature. For me, my work is explicitly political. Even choices that seem apolitical can be political. Poets in times of war who stay true to themselves are political in that insistence. That’s resistance too. In your paintings, I also notice group settings, rarely just a single eye or figure. There’s often a collective quality, something all-encompassing.
AA: That comes from sorority. I was always with my sisters. And the media I consumed often centered groups, books, shows, images where women band together. There’s something mystifying about entering all-women spaces. They carry an ancient wisdom, a grounded intuition. That atmosphere really attracts me. I also see parallels with my local culture, moments of women’s congregation. In our culture, those congregations are often framed domestically, in meal settings, in “ladies’ quarters.” Important conversations happen there, but they’re often undervalued. But in my work, I imagine beyond that. Beyond structures that legitimize some forms of power but not others. I hate that we always have to concede power in prescribed ways. Women have always found ways to be powerful. My work tries to envision what’s possible if those potentials were fully realized.
From my work, I always try to imagine beyond the very gendered structures that separate what’s seen as legitimate from what isn’t. Women have always found ways to be powerful in their own spaces. But I also wonder, what if women were simply allowed to reach their full potential? The idea of women together creates an atmosphere of seriousness, almost sophistication. It reminds me of Greco-Roman portraits of philosophers gathered in a room. I want to create that same mystique with women: gathering, plotting, talking, simply being together and doing things.
AA: I want to close by reflecting on Sofia Coppola and her films. She treats girlhood as something serious, something to be reckoned with, rather than dismissed as frivolous. That has influenced how I choose to portray women in my own work, especially against the disparaging ways girlhood is often framed.
There’s a vulnerability, even grotesqueness, in girlhood that male depictions tend to sanitize or fetishize. Coppola didn’t do that. For me, she’s perfect, and I won’t hear otherwise! She’s often dismissed for making “frivolous” films about girls, but her perspective on girlhood has shaped my own. Despite the criticism, her films capture something important about femininity, its materiality, and its so-called frivolity.
MM: That makes me think of The Virgin Suicides. The youngest sister’s suicide was such a devastating moment, you can see it coming, but you still feel the pain. She wasn’t glamorized, just a frustrated teenager at that archetypal age.
It reminds me of my niece, who’s nine. When I see her apologizing too much, making herself smaller, I get angry, not at her, but at the world teaching her that. I tell her not to apologize, to take up space. And yet, I know my own response risks reinforcing another cycle of control.
AA: Exactly. It’s also about how we grow with age. At 21, we resist out of stubbornness; later, we give in just to keep the peace. That’s why Coppola resonates, she shows that tension without flattening it. It’s fascinating that The Virgin Suicides was written by a man about teenage girls, but Coppola’s film reframed it. Yes, it’s still a male fantasy in parts, but the girls remain central, the true protagonists.
MM: That reminds me of a film called Behind the Veil by Eve Arnold. She was a talented photographer, but also misguided. She came just before the UAE’s unification and filmed a royal wedding. She insisted on bringing an all-female crew from the UK, because she couldn’t find women technicians locally at the time.
In her memoir, she describes how hard it was to assemble a team of women for sound and technical roles. But when she looked at Emirati women in the palace, she cast them as “poor, secluded women.” In reality, those women with their own quarters weren’t suffering, they had power and dignity.
AA: Exactly.
MM: And the only men allowed into those women’s quarters were boys or non-Arab men, because Arab men weren’t considered permissible there. That was problematic, of course, but it also meant women enjoyed each other’s presence freely. Arnold filmed these men serving fruit, sweets, and drinks. She then zoomed in on the women eating, framing their mouths as erotic objects. She projected her own ideas, suggesting Arabs saw the mouth as the most sexual part of the body. But the women weren’t passive, they were laughing, eating, fully comfortable. What she thought of as oppressive, they were living as empowered.
For me, these all-female spaces are powerful. I know some criticize them, but I actively choose them now: women’s gyms, travel groups, salons. It’s not about restriction; it’s about freedom from unwanted energy, about feeling safe together.
And it’s fascinating to immerse yourself in those spaces and realize how much women have actually decentered men.
AA: These women don’t even have to think about men. From an outsider’s lens it looks like limitation: “You don’t get to choose.” But within these spaces, there’s agency, freedom, and different priorities. In the Western canon, feminism often equates freedom with hypersexuality: hookup culture, one-night stands. That’s a valid choice, but it’s only one version of agency. When you consider women-only spaces, they don’t need to be framed as a lack of freedom. They’re simply different. We’ve had these conversations since the 80s, but still, the Western gaze insists on framing empowerment through sex. It ignores how women create other forms of power and joy in their own spaces.
Aliyah AlAwadhi (b.1996, UAE) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Abu Dhabi. She received her BFA in Animation Design with a Minor in Curatorial Practices from Zayed University in 2020. Working primarily in painting and video, her practice explores girlhood, adolescence, the body, and femininity, often drawing from speculative fiction and internet culture.
She was an editor and member of the Banat Collective, a grassroots project aimed at representing femme-centered artistry in the MENA region and was a chosen member of the 2020 Youth Assembly courtesy of Art Jameel, culminating in the Youth Takeover event hosted by the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. She was also one of the participating artists for the 101 initiative's inaugural sale, "Outside In, Inside Out" (2020) at Bait 15 curated by Munira Al Sayegh and Ghaith Abdulla, to promote non-gallery represented artists. She was also a fellow in the 8th cohort of the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design. She has appeared in several exhibitions locally and internationally, including "This lark sips at every pond" (2021) at Maisan15 in Dubai, "Ybna Al3eid" (2022) at Bayt Al Mamzar in Dubai and the inaugural Banat Collective-curated exhibition “As We Gaze Upon Her” (2021-22) at Warehouse 421 as well as “East-East Vol. 4: The Curio Shop” (2021) held at HB Nezu in Tokyo and “Boundless/Binding” (2024) curated by Emergeast and shown at Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, USA.
Moza Almatrooshi (b. 1991, UAE) is a multimedia conceptual artist & chef born in Dubai, who currently lives and works in Sharjah, UAE. Her practice sheds light on narratives from both ancient and contemporary mythologies from the Arabian Peninsula, with research investigating food & territorial knowledge and how they have been shaped across time, spanning agricultural practices, imperial impositions, and postcolonial realities. Almatrooshi has a BFA in arts and creative enterprises from Zayed University, Dubai, an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and a diploma in culinary arts from ICCA Dubai. She is an alumna and former faculty fellow of the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship, Abu Dhabi. She currently runs a ‘landscape to table’ culinary studio, alongside her art practice.
