Latifa Alajlan - Garden of Memories, Palace of Colors

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present 'Garden of Memories, Palace of Colors', an online solo show by NYC-based artist Latifa Alajlan (b. 1998, Kuwait), curated by Nathalie Baume, launching on June 24, 2025. 

Latifa Alajlan is a painter born and raised in Kuwait. She moved to Chicago in 2017 to earn a B.F.A and an M.F.A from the School of the Art Institute and is today based in New York City. Under the tutelage of Gaylen Gerber, Lisa Wainwright, and Dan Gustin, as well as in dialogue with peers such as Bassim Al-Shaker, Latifa developed a painterly practice exploring atmospheric spatiality, evoking aromaticity, and wielding non-figurative Islamic referents and geometric patterns in abstract layered compositions. These elements are embodied in textured reliefs made of mixed materials. Through the use of color palettes laid on glass, thick brushes, and her own fingers, Latifa etches impastos and scumbles alike on linen and canvas. As such, Latifa harvests the possibilities of the medium’s materiality, not simply as pure visuality to be consumed by the eyes, but painting as texture, as surface, as rough skin, evoking touch, and the aggregated density of physical matter. Beyond privileging frames made of linen over canvas for the former’s desertic connotation and advantageous cost, Latifa’s work also wields and reflects on a variety of pigmenting materials and their cultural hierarchies–graphite, acrylic, sand, oil. Images therefore do not suffice to fully encapsulate her practice.

In this latest body of work 'Garden of Memories, Palace of Colours', Latifa experiments with a serialized study of color reminiscent of florality, and garden-like chromatic convergences. Latifa’s signature motif of lattice-like Islamic geometrism grounds the depth of the frames, anchoring spatiality in the settled background of rigorously connected lattices. In the foreground, the touches of color seem to hold the memory of the brushes' bristles' varying pressure–they create a sensation akin to the fragrant smoke of incense or oud as it fills and dissipates in space. In the midst of this aromatic evocation, Islamic octagrams mingle with more “secular” polygons such as four-cusped hypocycloids–all these shapes at times disconnectedly wander in the air of the tableau. Latifa’s geometric work therefore advances a pictorial topology that moves at the verge of the Islamic and the secular. Hearing Latifa speak of her work invites one to think about her visual project as reflecting on a contemporary context where texts, sacredly spiritual or scientifically revealing, are erected into monolithic truths and instruments of power, silencing the very inconstancy that initially produced them. If Latifa’s work undoubtedly evokes the realm of the spiritual, it considers spirituality as the quality of an elegant personal behavior–situated moral and ethical beauty reflected in the chromatic and sensorial jouissance in which her paintings bathe. This directly challenges any co-optations of spirituality as a set of norms of religiosity which easily slip their subjects into hypocrisies, akin to the darkly rigid polygons aimlessly wandering in Latifa’s frames.

Latifa’s work can be placed in lineage with a wave of Arab modernism that has recently been garnering increasing historiographical and curatorial attention. At the height of panarabism, between the 1960’s and 1980’s especially, artists as varied as Syrian-Iraqi painter Madiha Umar, Lebanese writer and artist Etel Adnan, and Moroccan painter Ahmed Cherkaoui, turned to the codes of abstraction. They conjoined two art historical trends that were questioning or had always questioned the notion of representational transparency in oculocentric cultures: European modernist avant-gardes and Arabo-Islamic non-representational visual heritage. These trends were fused in modernist abstraction to think about questions as varied as land, gender, and authority in the SWANA region, especially through the prism of multilingual subjectivity. In a time of decolonization, the transnational dialogues that fed these practices (the Hurrifiya movement and the journal Souffles are eloquent examples) were precipitated by the necessities of nation-building–made urgent by the throbbing wounds of postcolonial identity. 

Latifa’s work, however, emerges in a new and different historical context. A late postcolonial age where Southwest Asia and North-African nation-states have mostly regained their sovereignty, save for the grave consequences of the failures of SWANA states’ solidarity we are witnessing today. In any case, the global circulation of goods, bodies, ideas, and signs is at once greater and more unequal than ever before. In this context, the questions of religiosity and secularity, or the purported incompatibility of Western and Arab norms are becoming obsolete frames to new generations of artists. An Islamic visual heritage, especially as deployed in global art circuits, should not be read as the declaration of a constrictive affiliation but rather as a cultural repertoire that can be drawn from to think alongside and in mixity with other modes of inquiry into reality from across the globe. Latifa’s paintings instead enact a certain form of post-hybridity, a return to the diffracted transcultural roots of geometrism that can draw from Chicago, New York, Kuwait, and everything in between, without conflict in the fusion of visual referents. There is indeed a form of productive diplomacy in this decentered orbit of references, for this form of abstraction at once opens and hides meaning, speaking selectively, while allowing an infinity of access points–it enacts and invites crossed gazes, nourishing the nodes of potential dialogue between distinct cultural spheres. 

What is invisible yet haunts Latifa’s work is the writing beneath the paint. Latifa’s blueprints–her first contact with the surface of the frame–happens by writing mostly in English and Kuwaiti Arabic as a preliminary phase. The linguistic condition that Adnan, Cherkaoui, and Madiha Umar once addressed remains latent, but Latifa finds a different solution than that of thematizing linguistic signs. Moving away from Adnan, who was resolved to paint her linguistic condition, Latifa paints over her linguistic condition. Her paintings are always palimpsestic, but instead of covering old fading words with new sparklingly alive linguistic signs, she opacifies her own words by covering them with image and texture to produce space. As such, Latifa fashions out of language a tide of abstracted senses, imbuing the frame with an incarnated sense of life that overtakes any illusion of representational transparency. The paintings rather translate an ethereality where one’s perspective would float rather than stand. The result is a phenomenological promiscuity where one can smell color, read space, see touch, and sense depth in an (almost) two dimensional surface. 

To close this reflection, Latifa’s work eloquently evokes the universal condition of contemporary imaginaries and subjectivities–an experience of productive errantry within nebulous and ever-shifting topologies of culture, of language, of signs, ideas, and fashions, across the realms of embodied being and spiritual subjectivity.  

لطيفة العجلان (مواليد 1998، مدينة الكويت، الكويت) تستلهم في لوحاتها عناصر من الثقافة الكويتية من خلال استخدام الأنماط والأشكال. تعكس الطبقات التحتية الشبيهة بالمشربيات واستخدامها التعبيري للمعجون الغليظ (الإمباستو) زخارف معمارية منتشرة في الشرق الأوسط، بما في ذلك أماكن العبادة، والمباني الحكومية، والمعالم التاريخية.
ورغم أن أسلوب العجلان التجريدي يراعي تاريخ الفن غير التمثيلي في المنطقة، إلا أن أعمالها التعبيرية والمفعمة بالجو تمثل ممارسة مفاهيمية فريدة، تنبع من إحساس جسدي عميق. تندمج ضربات الفرشاة المشابهة لحركة الطيران مع رموز مرئية، في محاولة لطرح تساؤلات حول النُظم والهياكل الثابتة.

حصلت لطيفة العجلان على درجة الماجستير في الفنون الجميلة في الرسم والتصوير من معهد الفنون بشيكاغو (SAIC) عام 2023، وعلى درجة البكالوريوس في الفنون الجميلة من نفس المعهد عام 2021. وكانت فنانة مقيمة في برنامج بيت شعيب للإقامة الفنية في جدة، المملكة العربية السعودية، عام 2024.

لطيفة العجلان ممثلة من قبل معرض فرانكلن باراش في نيويورك.

For the Artist's CV please click here

Photo credit: Andrew Schwartz and Art Photo Biz