ArtDayMe: Azadeh Jafarian: In this images a figure shrouded in black drapery gazes outward with painted features that evoke ceremonial marking and emotional intensity. The setting switches between an empty roadway and a winter-bare woodland—two spaces stripped of distraction, allowing the body to become a central vessel of meaning.

This visual language of isolation, ritual costume, and face-as-canvas connects powerfully with Between Heaven & Earth, the Body I Borrowed, Nujoom Alghanem’s expanded poetic installation. Here, the body isn’t simply seen—it is inhabited, questioned, and pushed across thresholds of identity, gender, and cultural belonging.

Whether standing in public space or natural quiet, the figure becomes a witness, a pilgrim, perhaps a poet in disguise. Their stillness feels like both protest and prayer.

Beyond the Visible: Poetry, Film & Sound as Living Archives

Alghanem’s practice moves across mediums with fluidity—poetry becomes sound, performance becomes image, image becomes myth. For Between Heaven & Earth, she brings together:

• A sound installation from a poetry performance

• Space, a “visual poem”

• Silsilat Al Ramad, Volume 1, a 1985 self-published journal

created with the Aqwas collective

This constellation forms a self-excavation: tracing an artist’s evolution from radical youth publication to internationally awarded filmmaker.

Her decision to reproduce that early journal is not nostalgic; it is archival activism. It brings forward a generation of Emirati avant-garde cultural workers who shaped contemporary arts long before institutions did.

A Borrowed Body, A Claimed Voice

In these photographs and in the works they echo, the body is not passive. It is a carrier of histories, a contested surface for meaning, a mirror for the viewer.

To encounter Alghanem’s work is to be reminded that identity is not anchored—it is performed, remembered, borrowed and returned, like breath between heaven and earth.

In a world crowded with noise, she offers us a still figure draped in night—unsettling, dignified, unafraid to stand alone—and invites us to listen.

The Artist Who Speaks in Films and Verses

Born in Dubai in 1962, Nujoom Alghanem has built a career that bridges journalism, experimental writing, and cinema. Before she studied video production in the United States and later film in Australia, she spent over a decade as a journalist—a grounding that informs her attentive, humane lens.

Today she is recognized as one of the Gulf’s most significant contemporary creatives, with:

• 11 films, including six award-winning feature documentaries

• International festival jury roles

• A seat on the board of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Her films—Honey, Rain & Dust (2016), Nearby Sky (2014), Red Blue Yellow (2013), Amal (2011), and Hamama (2010)—often center voices and lives overlooked by dominant narratives: elders, women, nomads, everyday mystics.