Premonition, 2012

Premonition unfolds from the perspective of a Bahraini woman reflecting on the portrayal of European women in Renaissance art. In those paintings, the female body was often idealized into immortality rendered either as the chaste Madonna or the sensual Venus, perfected yet stripped of humanity.

In this work, the artist reverses that gaze. She transforms the female figure from a passive emblem of holiness or desire a tension still echoing within contemporary Bahraini society into an active, mortal protagonist capable of resistance, struggle, and divine confrontation.

Composed of two large-scale drawings, Premonition portrays the artist wrestling with a lion (8m x 7m), and the lion struck by light (6m x 5m). Both are charged with the aesthetic language of the Renaissance yet deeply autobiographical expressions of an inner conflict between devotion and defiance, between the yearning to please God and the courage to challenge the constraints of religion as culture.

Here, faith becomes combat, and illumination arrives not through submission, but through struggle.