Abeer Al-Kuwari,a self-taught, Qatari artist based in Doha, draws on diverse disciplines including photography, painting and sculpture to convey a contemporary perspective on identity, folklore and heritage. As the first female member of the Qatar Photographic Society, she gained recognition for her film portraits, earning the Saoud Al Thani Award for Photography in 2004.
As an artist in residence at Fire Station in Doha, in 2016 she [MB1] began to experiment with different mediums, including painting and sculpture. Focusing on Qatari fairy tales and folklore, she reinterprets iconic characters in her own unique style, sharing this rich and vibrant storytelling heritage with the next generation. Widely exhibited, Al-Kuwari’s recent series featured ‘negative painting’ – a blend of her roots of photography with mixed media, which was presented by al markhiya Gallery in the exhibition, ‘Perplexity’ in 2019.
Returning to Doha Fire Station in 2021 for the Alumni Residency Programme, Al-Kuwari continued developing these themes. In her more recent compositions, she portrays the people and culture of Qatar through an abstracted lens, raising questions dealing with beauty and identity in the face of modernity.