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Artist featured in The Heart’s Desire (October 3, 2026, to September 12, 2027)
Rand Abdul Jabbar b. 1990, Baghdad, Iraq; lives and works in Abu Dhabi
Rand Abdul Jabbar’s work borrows from the vestiges and ephemera of history to reconstruct its records, events and experiences. She contends with personal and collective memory while engaging in research around the resounding legacies of imperialism, archaeology, mythology and material culture. Employing sculpture, writing, video, and installation as primary mediums, her work unfolds through an experiential dialogue between recollection and re-imagination, creating anchors that allow the retelling and adaptation of the past into a space for reclaiming agency and affirming of identity.
Abdul Jabbar is an Iraqi-Canadian artist whose work has been presented notably at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2026), the NYUAD Art Gallery in Abu Dhabi (2026), the Seoul Museum of Art (2025), the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial (2025), Desert X AlUla (2024), the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (2023), SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin (2021), the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai (2019), the Orléans Architecture Biennale (2019) and the Rabat Biennale (2019).
She received the Richard Mille Art Prize in 2022 and holds a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University. Her writings and works have been published in numerous books, including In Plain Sight, Scenes from Aridly Abundant Landscapes (Kaph Books; Architecture of Culture, Irthi Contemporary Crafts Council), and Woman Made: Great Women Designers (Phaidon).
Image: Portrait of Rand Abdul Jabbar. Courtesy of the Royal Commission for AlUla.
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