Shaqayeq Arabi is an artist whose practice moves between sculpture, drawing, and intuitive material assemblage. Working with salvaged materials—branches, wire, palm fronds, rusted rods—she creates fragile sculptural forms that feel birdlike, vegetal, skeletal. Through these gestures of improvisation and play, Arabi conjures tenderness from debris, crafting beauty from what’s broken, twisted, or overlooked.
Rooted in the physical landscape of the Gulf, her works speak of entangled ecologies, often drawing on desert flora and the discarded remnants of urban life. Her approach is materially sensitive, favouring intuition over monumentality.
Arabi holds a deep interest in the poetics of assemblage and the minor acts of noticing, repairing, and reanimating. Each work is a quiet proposition that to make art is to be-with in fragile ways.
Arabi has exhibited widely in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Her recent shows include The Sea Was Far Away and the Sky Further at the Farjam Foundation, Dubai; Dancing on Stilts at Signs & Symbols, New York; Fragments, Notes & Lines with Fereydoun Ave at Total Arts at the Courtyard, Dubai; and Elsewhere at Mohsen Gallery, Tehran. Her work has also been presented at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and Aaran Projects.
