Lahd Gallery Pop Art duo Hamad & Ali!

The Kuwaiti Pop art duo, Hamad AlSaab and Ali Sultan, was featured in Lahd Gallery's first pop art exhibition. Presenting the Arab culture and history through their own contemporary vision, both Hamad & Ali believe that although pop icons around the world have transcended their time to become symbols of popular heritage and national pride, their works will reflect Arab culture in a modern and internationally accessible way.

Pop art has crossed all boundaries across all nations and cultures to produce many of the twentieth century iconic images. We are all too familiar with the expression “15 minutes of fame”, a short –lived, often ephemeral phenomenon. Because popular culture is something that almost everyone can identify readily with these days, this medium has arguably become one of the most effective means of communication.

The pop art collaboration of Hamad & Ali began when they used old film footage, vintage, magazine covers, and all sorts of material that they collected on these icons from flea markets and various archives, and interpreted them in a contemporary way. They wanted the world and their people to see that there is more to Arab culture than religion and politics, namely, a vast collection of movies, songs, musicals, and theatre that their generation of Arabs seem to have forgotten, and they wanted to revive these cultural treasures.

For Hamad & Ali, pop art is their way of expressing the emotions that they associate with their glamorous past, present and future. Their new approach of using celebrity icons from the Middle East to cast their own interpretation of the world and the current issues surrounding the region by using these icons to play out these messages is undoubtedly effective and we are all the more reminded of the arabesque motives and celebrities that made their glamorous past shine.

Kuwaiti artist Shurooq Amin and the untold truth of society girls

Lahd Gallery artist Shurooq Amin has created a collection of paintings which is based on a raw exploration of modern Arabian Gulf society, to reveal the hidden truths behind the lives of society girls in Kuwait.

The artist explores the polarity between the East and West, the idea which underpins her images. While the images do not profess to demean or criticise, nor to glorify and exaggerate, they are subtly satirical, however, in juxtaposing traditional with contemporary elements. They depict the girls in their embellished, fashionable state, an emblematic prototypical portrayal in which there tends to be a “sameness” of identity, expressing their individual sensual eroticism.

Unrelenting and inevitably controversial, the collection explores the darker depths of society’s suppression and the fragility of human nature, in a critical analysis of a group of women who choose to live their lives on their own terms. Each of the paintings will finally be shot with a small Hornet bullet, from an M16 sniper gun, providing an allegory of society’s murder of a woman’s sensuality and passion.

Shurooq Amin is one of Kuwait’s most eminent contemporary artists. She is also an Anglophone poet, a certified interior designer and a professor at Kuwait University.