Biography
Visual artist Alymamah Rashed’s surrealist paintings investigate the discourse of her own body as a Muslima Cyborg of the post-internet generation; fluctuating between the east and the west.
Rashed’s notion of the Muslima Cyborg unites the fleshed body, the thobe, and a combination of the two which comes to form a third space – the one that she emits onto her canvas. Rashed engages with the cyborg not as a mechanical object but in the sense of spiritual intelligence, as a motor, or a form of technology, as opposed to artificial intelligence or programming.
The Art
Referencing late Algerian modernist pioneer Baya Mahieddine’s idiosyncratic form of autobiographical portraiture, her art negotiates her female subjectivity, regional folklore, and the everyday banal objects that Rashed encounters as well as the rapid social shifts that she has witnessed such as the rapid industrialisation of the Gulf region. Rashed received her MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design in 2019 and her BFA in Fine Arts at The School of Visual Arts in 2016. She participated in various exhibitions in New York City including the Czech Center, Parsol Projects, and The New School. She is a recipient of the Masters Scholarship and the Merit Scholarship program by the Kuwait Ministry of Higher Education. She was also a fellow at the Professional Development Initiative Program sponsored by the National U.S-Arab Chamber of Commerce, Kuwait Ministry of Higher Education, Embassy of Kuwait, and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences. She has received multiple awards and participated in numerous exhibitions in New York City and in the Arabian Gulf region.
The Collection
Designs agreed with the artist, ready for allocation and made to order.
As part of her collaboration with Splendore Unique, Alymamah approached the art dial as an intimate yet powerful canvas to explore the idea of self-salvation born from the daily fluctuations of the human soul. Inspired by the notion that we generate tens of thousands of thoughts each day, she imagined each thought transforming into a bodily spirit of its own, with the body wandering inward to rediscover itself. Executed in oil paint and completed over the course of two hours, the final dial emerged after an initial composition was deliberately wiped away, allowing a new vision to surface. The resulting artwork depicts a figure submerged in water, suspended between floating and diving, capturing a moment of emotional liminality. The challenge she most enjoyed was working at such a small scale while still conveying a sense of vastness, translating a grand internal sensation into a wearable work of art that aligns with Splendore Unique’s philosophy of elevating timepieces into deeply personal artistic expressions.
