Shaqayeq Arabi Iranian, b. 1974

Shaqayeq Arabi (b. 1974, Tehran) is an Iranian contemporary artist who lives and works in Dubai. She studied Graphic and Visual Communication at Al Zahra University in Tehran before continuing her education in France, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UVHC University in Valenciennes and a Master of Fine Arts from Sorbonne University in Paris.

 Her practice unfolds across sculpture, assemblage, painting, and mixed-media forms, bringing together found materials, salvaged urban debris, organic remnants, and fragments of everyday environments. Arabi’s work is shaped by an instinctive process of gathering, binding, layering, and reconfiguring, through which discarded materials are transformed into dense visual and sculptural ecosystems.

 Rather than treating material as passive substance, Arabi approaches it as a carrier of memory, pressure, and lived experience. Her works often resist stable categorization: suspended between abstraction and material presence, they appear provisional, spectral, and vulnerable, yet maintain a forceful sense of persistence.

 Across her practice, Arabi reflects on the unstable relationship between body, environment, and memory. By foregrounding the overlooked and the discarded, she transforms marginal materials into charged sites of visual and emotional intensity, developing a language in which vulnerability is not opposed to strength, but becomes one of its most enduring forms.