Diana Al-Hadid examines the historical frameworks and perspectives that continue to shape discourse on culture and materials today. With a practice spanning sculpture, wall reliefs, and works on paper, the artist weaves together enigmatic narratives that draw inspiration from both ancient and modern civilizations. Al-Hadid’s rich allegorical constructions are born from art historical religious imagery, ancient manuscripts, female archetypes, and folkloric storytelling frameworks. 

Framed by a host of references from antiquity, cosmology, cartography, and architecture, Al-Hadid’s work gives form to ghostly images abstractly rendered in materials as various as steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, wood, foam, plaster, aluminum foil, and pigment. The artist’s process-based explorations innovate from commonplace industrial materials. Their formidable presence sits steady in the lineage of creation and construction that we associate with empire, complicated by an often-elegiac tone. 

On these architectural associations, Aruna D’Souza has said, “Though Al-Hadid is known for making work that is engaged with architecture—imagining the body as a kind of scaffold or superstructure, using materials commonly found on building sites—it is anti-architectural in one crucial way: it is a product of intuition, of responsiveness in the moment, of seeing what’s there and what needs to come next, of having a vision and allowing it to develop according to its own logic. Though she draws upon a deep understanding of what is possible given her long engagement with her chosen materials and methods, there is no set plan, no strict blueprint, no predetermined schematics.”