Artist Statement

My artistic inquiry explores how memory—both personal and inherited—and femininity, shaped by culture, anchor women’s identities and lived experiences.

Drawing on visual anthropology and an interdisciplinary approach, I use drawing, installation, photography, film, and performance to build visual archives that uncover overlooked or silenced stories.

By combining archival fragments, oral histories, and performative gestures, I engage with themes of erasure, lineage, and embodied ritual, emphasizing how the silent body carries grief, resilience, and transformation.

My recent works—Letting Go, How the Silent Body Archives Grief, and Reconstructing Lineage Through Gesture—extend this inquiry, reconstructing emotional and cultural narratives to humanize the feminine experience.

Biography

Mona Al-Qanai (b. 1978, Kuwait) is a multidisciplinary artist and visual anthropologist whose practice bridges contemporary art and visual ethnography. Through bold experiments in drawing, installation, photography, and film, she investigates how memory, identity, and ritual shape women’s lived experiences.

Al-Qanai earned an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester (2011) and a BA in English Literature from Kuwait University (1998–2002). Her Kuwaiti–American heritage informs a bicultural perspective that grounds her creative research and visual storytelling.

Her debut solo exhibition, Black (2005), at the Museum of Modern Art Kuwait, presented minimalist ink paintings that challenged monochrome traditions and explored inner emotion. Since then, she has built a two-decade career spanning visual anthropology, contemporary art, film, and cultural consultancy.

Al-Qanai held a senior position at Kuwait’s National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters and, in 2023, founded her own consultancy to align her creative and professional work with evolving cultural values.

Her art has been exhibited across the Gulf, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including Letting Go (Al-Adwani Hall, 2023), Out of Kuwait (London, 2013), the Sadu Art & Design Initiative (Kuwait), and the New York Art Expo (2006, 2009). She received the Summer Painting Exhibition Award from the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters, recognizing her conceptual depth and cultural resonance.