Khawla Abu Saleh
Khawla Abu Saleh at the easel, Dubai

Khawla
Abu Saleh

Visual Artist
Conceptual Installation Artist
Dubai, UAE

I work with identity as a system rather than a declaration — something assembled through inheritance, relational positioning, and time, and something that can fail to hold. The moments where it fails are where my work begins: when inherited structures collapse, when familiar roles lose their authority, and the self enters the interval between what has ended and what has not yet formed.

I was trained in classical oil painting and Baroque-inspired realism, and painting remains the slow center of my practice. The ongoing ROSE Series — nine oil paintings, each built on a radial compositional system — examines how emotional inheritance, relational roles, and folded time operate inside a single frame. I am not interested in transformation as resolution; I paint the instability before it, where identity is still in formation and meaning resists closure.

Installation extends the same inquiry into space and duration. In Dance of Horizons, presented at SIKKA Art & Design Fair, a rotating sun-and-moon mechanism responds to the viewer's proximity — presence itself alters the rhythm of the work. The sensors and motors stay concealed; technology operates as a quiet mediator, never the subject. My installation Ashes of the Becoming was selected for ISEA 2026 through the Reality Art + Tech collective, where I trained as one of six artists developing sensor-based and kinetic work (Dubai Culture, 2024–2025).

Across both forms, the question stays the same: is identity something we choose, or something we inherit — and what becomes possible when inherited identities no longer hold.

Khawla Abu Saleh working in the studio Khawla Abu Saleh at the easel with a ROSE Series painting in progress

Exhibitions & Presentations

ISEA 2026 — International Symposium on Electronic Art, Dubai — 2026
SIKKA Art & Design Fair, Dubai — Dance of Horizons — 2025
ADIHEX, Abu Dhabi — 2024
Made in Tashkeel, Dubai — 2024
Etihad Airways 20th Anniversary Exhibition, Abu Dhabi — 2023
Ras Al Khaimah Fine Arts Festival — 2022

Sands of the Seven — earlier classical work →   First works →

Talks

Masterclass — Art & Technology, Tashkeel, Dubai — September 2026
Speaker & Co-Host — TEDxJumeirahBeachPark Art Salon, Kanvas Dubai — How Art Can Communicate Ideas — 2025
Speaker — Dubai AI Week, Visual Storytelling with AI, hosted by Women in AI UAE — 2025
Panelist — Communicate.ai Conference — 2025
Presenter — SPAK Salon, Lolo House — Dance of Horizons — 2025

Contact

studio@khawlaabusaleh.com
Instagram — @khawlaabousaleh
LinkedIn — khawlaabousaleh
Dubai, United Arab Emirates