Kuwaiti artist Thuraya Al-Baqsami discusses linocut inspired by Iraq’s invasion of her country
Updated 04 August 2023
Rawaa Talass
DUBAI: Veteran Kuwaiti artist Thuraya Al-Baqsami discussed with Arab News her 1990 linocut – “No to the Invasion” – inspired by Iraq’s invasion of her country.
“No to the Invasion,” 1990. (Supplied)
This is my favorite painting of mine. It is my icon. I made it during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I was in Kuwait in 1990 and it was the only summer that I didn’t travel. Everything started on August 2. I was with my husband and three young daughters. I moved to a safer area in Kuwait, but my mother and sisters decided to leave. They asked me to come with them and I said, “No. I’m not going anywhere.”
On August 5, my husband’s friends were sitting in my studio, preparing a plan for an underground bulletin called “People’s Resistance.” I had my small press and made a blue-and-white linocut, showing two angry faces — a man and a woman — and wrote “No to the Invasion” in Arabic. It is very direct, showing the anger of the people, and I was one of them.
My plan was to print this artwork, make photocopies of it, and put them all over Kuwait — like a poster to show Iraqi soldiers that they were not welcome. But I couldn’t do that because it was very dangerous. I gave some to our friends, but sadly some were caught and executed. I was very scared and thought that maybe they’d look for me. I decided to hide the linocut block in the air conditioning unit on the roof.
It didn’t take me long to finish; I had everything ready in my head. My problem was the Arabic calligraphy, which I’m not good at. But I tried my best. In this artwork, I present a Kuwaiti man and woman in their national clothes to represent ‘the People’. There’s no way to just have a man alone; most of those in the underground resistance were women.
After the liberation, I managed to print this work. I’m very happy that it’s been shown in New York, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Eritrea, London and Edinburgh. This work is suitable for any time, for any nation suddenly invaded by another country to get more land. It’s happened again and again, like Palestine and Ukraine. I think this artwork will never get old or die, because there’s always suffering happening somewhere in this world.
‘We’re rooted in the local community, but also global’ — inside AlUla Arts Festival
The fifth edition of the festival began Jan. 16 and runs until Feb. 14
Updated 6 sec ago
Nada Alturki
ALULA: The fifth AlUla Arts festival began last weekend. Until Feb. 14, the ancient oasis has become a living backdrop for bold land art, workshops, dance and musical performances inspired by the area’s majestic desert canyons and lush palm groves.
Sumantro Ghose, the arts and creative industries programming director, said: “We started in 2022 with 19,000 visitors. In 2025 (we had more than) 70,000. So we’re a growing festival. And what makes us unique is that we’re very rooted in the local community, but we’re also global.”
“We believe that AlUla, as a destination, was built by artists for artists,” Hamad Alhomiedan, director of arts and creative industries at the Royal Commission for AlUla, told Arab News. “That’s why we have this amazing program this year, which will be our largest art festival yet, and it’s basically focused on three cultural assets that we’re developing,” he continued. Those three assets are: AlJadidah Arts District, Wadi AlFann, and the upcoming Contemporary Art Museum of AlUla.
Aseel Alamoudi, AlUla Design Residency Artwork 2025, displayed at AlUla Design Space. (Courtesy of the RCU and Lorenzo Arrigoni)
One of the highlights of the festival, once again, is Desert X AlUla, which runs until Feb. 28. The international site-specific contemporary art exhibition returns to AlUla for the fourth time, showcasing 11 installations by local, regional, and international artists — from Sara Abdu’s layering of poetry and geological strata to Héctor Zamora’s “Tar HyPar,” which transforms the valley into a musical instrument.
The exhibition, curated by Zoé Whitley and Wejdan Reda under the vision of artistic directors Neville Wakefield and Raneem Farsi, is inspired by the poetry of the late US-Lebanese writer and philosopher Kahlil Gibran, under the theme “Space Without Measure.”
“In the spirit of Gibran’s words, this edition of Desert X 2026 unfolds as an invitation to dream, to wander, and to connect with the landscape — not as something observed from a distance, but as something deeply felt. Here, space opens beyond measure, and it is from this shared invitation, the artists begin to speak, each in their own register, material and rhythm, offering personal yet deeply atoned responses to the landscape,” Reda said during the exhibit’s opening ceremony.
Ayman Zedani's 'The Holy Wadi' is on display in the exhibition 'Arduna.' (Supplied)
Elsewhere, the exhibition “Arduna” (‘our land’) ushers in the pre-opening of AlUla’s Contemporary Art Museum. Running from Feb. 1 to Apr. 15, the exhibit is a collaboration with Centre Pompidou and the French Agency for AlUla development and features contemporary art from the RCU’s collection alongside pieces from France’s Musée National d’Art Moderne, including works by Kandinsky and Picasso.
Alhomiedan said: “The community sits at the center of the development (of the Contemporary Art Museum). We did more than 30 focus groups, asking ‘What do you want the museum to look like? Do you know what a museum is?’ And ‘How do you imagine the museum can step out of the boundary of the wall and also reach to the houses and go inside these houses?’ Because we don’t believe a museum (to be) this physical space.”
The AlJadidah Arts District plays a major role in the festival, staging a number of initiatives, including newly commissioned artworks, workshops, exhibitions, film screenings, and musical performances. Saudi-French cultural institution Villa Hegra is hosting the photography exhibition “Not Deserted: AlUla’s Archives in Movement,” which features early 20th-century photographs by Tony André alongside an exhibition of cinematic images of desert landscapes by Saudi filmmaker and Villa Hegra resident Saad Tahaitah, while the AlUla Music Hub presents a number of concerts, ranging from Arabic, to jazz, to fusion. Cinema AlJadidah presents a curated series of art documentaries, feature films, and shorts, set in the open-air, and at ATHR Gallery, visitors can find works by Saudi-born artist Sara Abdu exploring architecture as memory.
Works on display in the photography exhibition 'Not Deserted.' (Supplied)
Just across from ATHR Galley at Design Space AlUla is “Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within,” an exhibition curated by Dominique Petit-Frère and Majedah Alduligan and artistically led by Ali Alghazzawi and Arnaud Murand, that highlights the connection between design and place and includes works by five participants in the AlUla Artist Residency’s 2025 design edition.
Alhomiedan said: “Every single one of these initiatives is inspired by the place and by memory and materials. Because if we don’t focus on that, then you can do this work anywhere else in the world.
“Focusing on where you are right now — like, the shadows of the palm groves or the palm trees, the different local plants that you can extract pigments from, local stones, different local fabrics, the local flora and fauna — this is how artists explore creativity through the place, memory, and community of AlUla.”
The festival positions art as a connective pillar between nature and heritage, aiming not only to revive the artistic practices exemplified in the ancient architectural marvels of the tombs in Hegra or the carefully carved statues uncovered in Dadan, but also to utilize their powerful history as proof of the region’s inherent gravitation towards art.
