The practice
Al-Qatt Al-Asiri is a women-led tradition of geometric interior wall decoration originating in the Asir region of Saudi Arabia.
MA Creative Research Project / King's College London
Made Together,Displayed Apart
A Creative Research Inquiry into Al-Qatt Al-Asiri in Asir, Saudi Arabia
Ten women in Asir each painted one canvas. All ten are glad to see Al-Qatt circulating. What they defend is not the shape but what the shape carries.
Artist and researcherThe researcherAsir, Saudi ArabiaFieldwork / July 2026
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The question
How do women practitioners of Al-Qatt Al-Asiri in Asir experience and make sense of the commodification of their practice, and what does this transformation mean for them?
For generations, women in Asir painted together, learned from one another, and transformed domestic walls into shared cultural memory. This exhibition presents ten paintings made in answer to that history, and what the women who made them say has changed.
01Home02Women03Memory04Transmission05Institution06Display
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The context
From domestic wall
to public frame.
Collective transmission
The practice was historically learned through observation, participation, family relationships, and collective making.
Transformation
Following increased recognition and safeguarding, Al-Qatt now appears in institutional training, tourism, products, public surfaces, and commercial environments.
What is shown
Ten paintings by ten women, held as five family pairs, alongside the rooms, tools and colours they came from.
Domestic surface Institutional frame
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The paintings
Ten participants.
Five family pairs.
Each pair brings together two generations from the same family. Their paintings are held as related works rather than isolated images.
Pair relationship Named participants
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Ten, together
Ten paintings.
Five family pairs.
One shared view.
The collective canvas was never made. Alaa has painted collectively once, found it valuable, and prefers to work alone for the freedom it gives her over motifs and colours. Sharifah tried it and prefers to work alone because group work can change the idea she had in mind. Wejdan enjoyed painting with her grandmother but noted that another person may paint over the colour she had chosen. What has been individualised is not only the circumstance but the preference, and that is a finding the collective canvas would have hidden.
It is better with the women, because each adds something of her taste to the others.— Fatimah Faye
10 handmade paintings 5 family pairs 1 segmented display
Segmented painting displayTen original handmade works shown together
Asir / July 2026
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How the work was made
Making as a mode
of knowing.
Ten women each painted one canvas in answer to a single question: what does Al-Qatt mean to you. The canvases were made in museums, studios and houses across Asir, and each session ended in conversation. A collective canvas was planned and never made. Asked about painting together, most of the younger women said they now prefer to work alone. That absence is part of what this exhibition shows.
Individual painting and conversation
- Ten individual participants
- Five intergenerational family pairs
- Open painting prompt and individual canvas
- Recorded conversation after painting
- Approximate session length: two to three hours
- Painting and spoken reflection analysed together
The collective session that did not happen
- Ten completed individual paintings
- Five intergenerational family pairs
- The collective canvas was never made
- Ten original works shown in a segmented display
- No image generation or alteration
- Each painting retains its participant authorship
LocationAsir, Saudi Arabia
Fieldwork8–28 July 2026 / six visits
SessionsTwo to three hours each
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The conversations
What we
talked about.
Each session began with painting and ended in conversation. These are the four things we returned to.
- What did you choose to paint, and why?
- What motifs and colours did you choose?
- What do those motifs and colours mean to you?
- What does painting Al-Qatt mean to you personally?
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Ethics, consent, and privacy
Participant care
is structural.
Publication is treated as a consent decision, not a design setting. All ten participants consented to be named.
- Participants could decline any question.
- Participants could ask for recording to pause or stop.
- Withdrawal followed the approved consent documentation.
Reflective close
What these women defend is not the shape but what the shape carries.
HomeWomenFamilyMemoryGestureVoiceTransmissionDisplayTogether
The answer these ten women give is that they welcome it. All ten are glad to see Al Qatt circulating, and several have carried it outward themselves. What they defend is the knowledge that gives the form its meaning, the names of the shapes, where each belongs, the occasions attached to them, and what worries them is that circulation carries the shapes without it. That knowledge once travelled with the practice, because it was learned by watching inside the house. Taught now in workshops, institutes and from screens, the stories do not always follow.
I wanted to end with one painting all ten of us made together, and I could not. At first I read that as a scheduling problem: summer, travel, families to visit. Over time I saw that failing to gather them carries a meaning of its own. The love of Qatt has not disappeared, but the conditions that let women gather and practise it together are no longer as they were. What I saw in the canvases is that the older women work from memory and from the hand, and the younger from rulers, angles and images they went looking for; not less attached, differently placed. What held the practice up in every family I visited was support inside it, husbands behind wives, mothers behind daughters. In my childhood Al Qatt was in front of me all the time and I did not see it. The painting taught me a little of the patience the work takes. The women taught me why it deserves the attention in the first place.
The value of Al Qatt is not only the shape on the wall. It is the women who practised it, and the time, effort, patience, knowledge and relationships behind it. If the meaning sits in what the maker knows, the question is not which motifs to protect but how a woman comes to know what she is drawing.