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Object History
Mona Al Khaja is a UAE artist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cairo University. She is a member of the Emirates Association of Fine Arts and a member of the committee for the creation of the curriculum of art education in the UAE.
This example was created among a handful of others by a group of UAE female artists and donated to the Zay initiative, during an afternoon spent together to celebrate UAE women empowerment at the home of the Zay Initiative’s founder in 2018.
The artists worked together during a four-hour session, each placing her individual design on silk. The fabrics where then collected and a combination (thawb) and (kandurah) gown (thawb_kandurah) was designed from each artwork to be preserved in the artist’s name within the Zay collection.
Object Features
The artist chose to paint (rasm) in her individual abstract style using blue, green, and yellow colours on a white silk background.
The silk fabric was then transformed by Dr. Reem Tariq El Mutwalli into the inner tunic dress (kandurah).
Light blue silk tulle (tur) hand-embroidered with uniformly scattered white pearls were used to create the upper overgarment (thawb). The neckline, now joining the two garments, was modernised using a crochet collar dipped in the same colours used by the artist and embellished with crystals and pearls. The same was applied to sleeve cuffs (swarah) or (hyul) on the inner (kandurah), echoing the round circular shapes of the overall abstract design. The back was left simply accentuated by a train (thayil).
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