Salwa Rashad

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Salwa Rashad is a contemporary artist born in Alexandria, Egypt. A painter by academic training, she gained an additional interest in photography as a technique of cultural representation, participating in several photography workshops in the past two decades. Rashad’s paintings are acute searches for meaning, where the painter as an observer of daily realities is at once engrossed and alienated. With predominantly dark tones, oscillating between warmth and iciness, the paintings depict unusual groups of protagonists, with highly expressive gestures and poses, and slightly distorted facial expressions. The characters are somewhat repetitive, as if multiple hypostases of the same sensibility. The vulnerability and humorousness of existential quests for transparency in togetherness are simultaneously unraveled through these unearthly, uncanny tableaus. The works of Rashad have been exhibited in spaces such as the Aesha Fahmy Centre in Cairo, Bibliotheca Alexandra, and Behna Artspace. In 2009, she had a collaborative residency project in Los Angeles at the MAK Centre for Art and Architecture, documenting the lives of Arab immigrants in the US.