At Abu Dhabi Creative Centre, Pull Up a Chair brings together 17 Emirati women artists in an intimate group exhibition exploring memory, identity, emotion and the details of everyday life. Curated by Sara Al Sulaimani, the exhibition invites visitors to slow down and engage with works that transform personal experiences into tactile and deeply reflective artworks.
Rather than following one visual language, the exhibition moves across printmaking, installation, textiles, painting, poetry and sculpture. What connects the works is their attention to the personal — the memories we preserve, the routines we repeat and the emotions that quietly shape who we become.
Among the works is Sara Mohamed Jumaa Alromaithi’s What Consumes My Thoughts (2026), a series of eight ink-on-gel-plate prints created using medical IV tubes. Forms that initially appear almost cosmic reveal a more personal and unexpected source, turning a clinical object into an expressive visual language.
Maitha Alhosani’s Consumed (2026) looks at another familiar part of contemporary life: consumption. Made from receipts and metal chains, the installation gathers traces of everyday purchases, from branded shopping receipts to an ADNOC fuel transaction. Together, they become a record of habits, desire and the fleeting satisfaction attached to acquiring something new.
The exhibition also explores memory through touch and making. In Sara Alketbi’s Beneath the Fur (2026), acrylic yarn is transformed into suspended, furry forms inspired by the artist’s relationship with cats. The work turns an everyday experience of touch into something almost architectural, creating a space associated with comfort and intimacy.
Fay Almazrouei’s Indeed, Allah Is with the Patient (2026) takes a more personal route. Individual foam beads covered with dried rose petals recall the artist’s late grandmother and the experience of learning to make beads with her. Here, the process itself becomes part of the artwork, connecting craft, memory and care.
Shamsa Al Qubaisi’s On the Edge of Absence (2026) approaches memory through fragmentation. Screen-printed images appear across translucent organza alongside a suspended sewing machine, creating a scene that feels caught between preservation and disappearance. The overlapping images suggest memories that are never completely fixed — constantly fading, returning and being reconstructed.
Elsewhere, Ghaya Al Meharibi transforms a glass brick wall into an unconventional archive in What Is a Person If Not Memories (2026). Family gatherings, beach scenes and intimate moments are painted across the individual glass blocks, allowing the architecture itself to interrupt and divide the images. The result reflects the imperfect way memories are stored: never as one complete picture, but as scattered fragments.
Poetry enters the exhibition through Reem Alkatheeri’s Build. World to Breathe (2026), where 24 small wooden frames contain fragments of writing dealing with fear, exhaustion and acceptance. The intimate scale of the work gives the impression of encountering someone's private thoughts, turning the gallery into a space for quiet reflection.
Together, the works in Pull Up a Chair suggest that memory is not simply something we look back on. It is something we continuously construct through objects, gestures, relationships and places. A receipt, a piece of fabric, a family photograph or a handmade object can become a doorway into something much larger.
The exhibition’s strength lies precisely in this intimacy. There is no single definition of memory here, and no attempt to make personal experience universal. Instead, each artist offers a fragment of her own world, leaving visitors to recognise their own memories within it.
Pull Up a Chair is on view at Abu Dhabi Creative Centre until 21 August 2026.
