In February, Moscow isn’t so much a habitat as it is a dare – a frozen expanse where the very concept of “living space” feels like an act of aggression perpetrated by winter. So there was something deliciously perverse about 3L Gallery choosing this particular deep freeze to mount an exhibition about gardens.
While the city outside performed its annual impersonation of an entirely uninhabitable habitat, a handful of artists from the Gulf brought in something far more subversive than contraband: actual warmth. Not the polite, topiary kind that English dukes once commissioned to impress their neighbors, but something stranger and more potent – interior landscapes, walled and wild and wondrously ungovernable.
Habitat. Hortus Conclusus, running until 4 April, brings together Elnaz Javani, Asma Yousef Al Ahmed, Alymamah Rashed and Zeina Abdullah in what might be Moscow’s most significant survey of contemporary Middle Eastern art to date. The timing is immaculate. Just as Dubai’s art scene metastasises into something genuinely global – Art Dubai now competing with Basel in ways that would have seemed delusional a decade ago – here comes an exhibition that asks what happens when you carry your culture inside you like a seed.
The metaphor of the enclosed garden, it turns out, has been doing heavy lifting across civilisations for rather longer than most of us have been alive. The Persian pairidaeza gave us “paradise”, etymologically speaking. The medieval hortus conclusus gave the Virgin Mary somewhere suitably chaste to reside. And Augustine of Hippo, never one to miss an opportunity for interiority, gave us the concept of the “inner man”. What these four artists have done is take this overdetermined piece of cultural furniture and rearrange it for an age of anxiety, migration and the peculiar loneliness of infinite digital connection.
Asma Yousef Al Ahmed, who emerged from the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship in 2016 looking suspiciously like someone who knew exactly what she was doing, transforms the jagged geology of Ras Al Khaimah into something approaching meditation. Her mountainous landscapes, rendered in mixed media with enough thread to make your grandmother weep, register the violence of rapid urbanisation with the delicacy of a seismograph. The Hajar Mountains become characters in a drama about persistence – they have been there longer than any of us, and they will remain long after the last skyscraper has crumbled into the Gulf.
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There is something deeply satisfying about watching an artist who understands that geology is autobiography by other means. Al Ahmed’s Folded Memory, a detail of which greets visitors like an embroidered thesis statement, suggests that the earth itself remembers what we have chosen to forget. In a region where memory often feels like a luxury item – Dubai’s relationship with its past is, shall we say, elective – this borders on quiet sedition.
Across the gallery, Elnaz Javani’s textile works float with the eerie weightlessness of dreams that refuse to dissipate upon waking. The Iranian artist, who moved between Tehran University of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before accumulating enough fellowships to make any emerging artist weep with envy, constructs what she calls “sculptures” from hand embroidery. Her figures drift across muslin like migrants crossing borders – which, in a sense, they are. Mainstay (2018) depicts figures suspended in a space that could be sky, sea or the inside of an eyelid; you are never quite sure, and that uncertainty is precisely the point.
Javani’s practice, which has earned her a Terra Foundation grant and the attention of institutions ranging from Madrid’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo to the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, treats embroidery as something closer to cartography. Each stitch marks territory. Each layer of thread records displacement. In an era when migration has been reduced to statistics and talking points, Javani restores its texture – literally. One can almost feel the weight of abandoned homes, the heft of lost languages, in the tension of her thread.
Zeina Abdullah, born in 2001 and therefore young enough to make the rest of us feel historically irrelevant, approaches the theme of home through its domestic debris. The emerging Emirati artist, who graduated from the University of Sharjah in 2024 and has already exhibited at Abu Dhabi Art and VOLTA Basel, transforms family rituals into vessels approaching the sacred. A teapot becomes a reliquary. A familiar chair becomes a throne of memory. In Abdullah’s hands, the everyday objects of Gulf domesticity carry emotional charge like live wires.
There is a risk here, of course – the risk of sentimentality, of nostalgia dressed up as profundity. Abdullah avoids it through restraint. Her work does not demand emotion; it simply creates the conditions in which feeling might occur. In a region where the domestic sphere has historically been women’s territory – and therefore territory long deemed unworthy of serious artistic attention – Abdullah’s insistence on its significance feels quietly revolutionary. She is not making work about “universal themes”. She is making work about her themes, trusting that the universal will follow.
Then there is Alymamah Rashed, whose Muslima Cyborg series suggests what might happen if Donna Haraway had grown up surrounded by Kuwaiti folklore and a healthy scepticism towards Western feminism’s claims to universality. Rashed, who earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from Parsons School of Design before participating in the Lady Dior Art Project, paints bodies as gardens – third spaces where East and West engage in something more interesting than combat.
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The Blue Atom (pigments and oil on canvas, a monumental 340 by 220 centimetres) presents the body as a site of synthesis rather than contradiction. Rashed’s figures incorporate Kuwaiti folklore, digital selfhood, mythological imagery and the detritus of globalisation into something that feels less like collage and more like evolution. This is what happens when one refuses to choose between tradition and contemporaneity – when one insists, against all pressure to pick a side, on being both fully Muslim and fully of the digital age.
The collaboration with Dior is telling. Rashed’s work attracts the attention of luxury houses not because it is decorative – it is not – but because it understands something fundamental about how identity functions in the Gulf today. We are all cyborgs now, pieced together from fragments of heritage, Instagram, family memory and whatever algorithmic content the feed serves up at 2 a.m. Rashed does not mourn this condition. She paints it, gloriously, at monumental scale.
What unites these four artists, beyond their regional origins and the impeccable curation of Marina Baisel and Elena Belolipetskaia, is their refusal of easy authenticity. They are not interested in representing “the Middle East” to a Russian audience hungry for orientalism with better production values. Instead, they offer something stranger and more valuable: evidence that the interior life survives migration, displacement and relentless urban development.
The garden metaphor, it turns out, was never really about plants. It was always about enclosure – about the space one carves out from the world and declares one’s own. In an era when privacy has become a luxury commodity (see also the rise of private jets, private members’ clubs and private Instagram accounts), the hortus conclusus acquires new resonance. These artists are not merely making work about identity; they are making space for it to exist.
Habitat. Hortus Conclusus runs at 3L Gallery, Moscow, until 4 April. For those unable to brave the Russian winter, Rarares Gallery in Dubai represents Javani, Abdullah and Al Ahmed, while Tabari Gallery represents Rashed. One suspects the work will travel. Gardens, after all, have a way of spreading.
