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ANIA SOLIMAN | KAHRABAA’

Ania Soliman’s installation at Art Dubai 2025 explores the intersection of technology, nature, and memory. Titled Kahrabaa’, Arabic for ‘electricity’, the work was created during Beirut’s ongoing energy crisis, and reflects the deep connections between ecology, diaspora, and power systems. 

Soliman’s process involves layering machine parts and organic materials onto large canvases, spray-painting over them, then removing them to reveal intricate imprints. She then runs an Arabic dictionary definition of Kahrabaa’ through an AI programme: the resultant poetic mistranslations become subtitles, serving as textual interventions, and highlighting the creative potential of misunderstanding, translation, and machine poetics.

Kahrabaa’ reflects the UAE’s balance between traditional and ecological knowledge and hyper-modern infrastructure, turning narratives of energy consumption and environmental destruction into meditations on survival and renewal.

The work serves as a map of overlapping connections – between technology and nature, personal memory and collective experience, destruction and regeneration. It invites viewers to recognise the delicate, powerful networks that sustain life, revealing a deeply interconnected, electric world.  

Artist Biography

Ania Soliman is an Egyptian/Polish/American artist who grew up in Baghdad and is currently based between Paris and New York. Her multidisciplinary practice spans large-scale drawings, paintings, text, performance, video and installation, often incorporating AI-generated imagery and archival materials. Soliman’s work explores cultural translation, the digital unconscious, and the tension between organic and technological forms. 

She has exhibited internationally at venues such as Misk Art Institute (2024), Castello di Rivoli (2023, 2018), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2020), The Drawing Center in New York (2010, 2020), and the Whitney Biennial (2010). She attended Harvard College and Columbia University before participating in the Whitney independent Study Program. In 2010, she was awarded the Laurenz-Haus residency in Basel, Switzerland.