Almaha Jaralla

Artist Statement

My practice navigates the boundaries of memory, power, and belonging. Through paintings and installation, I interrogate the archival residues of South Arabia’s turbulent history. I engage with family archives and Sultan's Armed Forces (SAF) documents to fill the gaps of my visual memory and to reimagine certain locations. These paintings are not mere reproductions but acts of translation, where the archive’s authority frays under subjective intervention. Intuitively, the medium controls what is retained or erased from the photographs. This reveals how inherited images that carry colonial histories, and familial narratives mediate my encounter with identity and displacement. 

I am also preoccupied with the shifting architectural vernacular and how it has shaped the communities that inhabit it. I observe living environments as highly personal portraits. I often work from my own documentary photography as well as archival materials that offer insight into the Gulf at various moments in time. Drawing on archival photography, my works speak to the complex sociocultural dynamics and ancestral histories that have contributed to my lived experience. Questions of identities — individual and collective — are woven throughout.

Working across painting, photography, and more recently sculpture, my works create a speculative space. Here, the interplay of fidelity and distortion unearths the affective undercurrents of a port city’s layered past.

SAF (2025)
Painting
Oil on Canvas

Shilling (2025)
Installation
Watercolor on fabric, wood frame

Henna Night (2025)
Painting
Oil on canvas

Aden, a port city and critical hub of cultural exchange, anchors my inquiry into what it means to belong. To be Adeni is to pledge loyalty to a land that is itself a center of global migrations. It is an identity that is reflected in diverse clothing, accents, and cultural traditions that merge through a shared attachment to place. My work theorizes this fidelity as both refuge and rupture, a negotiation of home amidst the collapse of empire and Britain’s withdrawal in 1967. By reworking personal and military archival traces through painting, I resist linear histories, instead constructing a narrative that resonates with the multiplicity of voices that Aden housed. This practice invites viewers to dwell in the tension between permanence and ephemerality, to question how land and loss entwine in the making and unmaking of collective memory.

Drawing on the iconography of South Arabia’s colonial-era coins, Shilling (2025) mimics the cyclical nature of conquest and loss that defined Aden as a port city. The wooden sculpture carries the pattern of the eight-pointed connected star that is characteristic of these coins. It is draped in Dirac cloth, which originates in Somalia, and is traditionally worn by Adeni women. The coin’s transparency, visible from both sides, articulates a paradox: Every victory begets a shadow of defeat, while each side indelibly shapes the other. This oscillation mirrors Aden’s history of relentless colonization, where sovereignty was a fleeting illusion, and where coins multiplied as emblems of transient power.