At Buro247 Middle East, we are committed to showcasing and celebrating the extraordinary talent in the Arab world. With our column, #BuroSpotlights, we bring you stories of pioneering artists, innovative designers, tech trailblazers, cinematic visionaries, sports stars, and more.
This week, #BuroSpotlights Emirati artist Salmah Almansoori.
At a time when contemporary art often moves at the speed of spectacle, Salmah Almansoori works differently. Her practice asks you to slow down, to notice what lingers in places we think we know by heart. Walls, floors, discarded materials, and even the land itself become quiet witnesses in her work, absorbing memory, emotion, and the subtle tension between belonging and distance. For Almansoori, a space is never neutral. It carries weight, history, and feeling, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.
A multidisciplinary Emirati artist and researcher, Almansoori’s work moves fluidly across painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, and site-specific installation. At the core of her practice is an ongoing investigation into identity, memory, and the emotional architecture of place. Much of this inquiry is rooted in her hometown of Ghayathi, a setting she returns to not as nostalgia, but as a living archive. Through her work, Ghayathi becomes both subject and collaborator, shaping how stories are told, fragmented, and preserved.
Almansoori’s academic foundation plays a quiet but important role in her work. After earning her BFA in Visual Art from Zayed University in Abu Dhabi in 2023, she began translating research into material experimentation. Her approach feels deliberate and thoughtful, where concept and process are inseparable. Each medium is chosen with intent, allowing the work to respond organically to the ideas at hand rather than forcing a singular visual language.
Her exhibitions reflect the growing international resonance of her practice. From Abu Dhabi Art to MENA Art Fair in Paris, Cala Del Forte in Italy, and the International Digital Media Triennial in Poland, Almansoori’s work has traveled far beyond its geographic origins. Her solo exhibition, Memories Are Home in Ventimiglia in 2024, offered a deeply personal yet universally legible meditation on how memory settles into physical space, reinforcing her ability to speak across cultures without flattening specificity.
In recent years, material has taken on a particularly central role in her work. Almansoori’s latest body of work centers on handmade paper created from palm fibers, desert grasses, and recycled materials gathered directly from Ghayathi, including discarded paper and fabric. These surfaces are not simply aesthetic choices. They function as vessels, holding traces of everyday life and resisting the quiet erosion of cultural memory. There is a softness to these works, but also a resolve. They stand as acts of preservation without becoming sentimental.
This sensitivity to material and context has not gone unnoticed. Almansoori has received support from key cultural institutions such as the Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi and Manarat Al Saadiyat, alongside residencies and fellowships across the UAE, Europe, and the Americas. In 2025, she was awarded the National Grant for Culture and Creativity by the UAE Ministry of Culture and Youth for her project Archiving Ghayathi: Memory, Material, and Place. That same year, she received the Beyond Commission from Abu Dhabi Art, marking a significant milestone in her career.
What makes Almansoori’s work particularly compelling is its quiet confidence. There is no rush to explain everything, noreliance on overt symbolism. Instead, her practice trusts the viewer to meet the work halfway, to reflect on their own relationship with place, memory, and loss.
With her works now held in public, private, and corporate collections across the UAE and Europe, Salmah Almansoori is steadily shaping a practice that feels both grounded and expansive. Her art does not shout for attention. It stays with you, unfolding slowly, much like memory itself.
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