Bio

Dima Abou Zannad was born in Beirut, in 1999—she lives and works in Sharjah now. Her practice is a study in traces: the Trace in language, in memories, and places. Abou Zannad bargains with the underskin of words, their twisting roots and semiotic swerves. Her multidisciplinary process is a performance and a deconstruction. Applied to her artmaking, this involves collecting, extracting, and rearranging language in its various forms. She descends from a delta of stream-of-consciousness stylists–Woolf, Joyce, Proust, and Lispector. Her flow takes shape in their wake. All currents of citation, however, breakwater at the cusp of her personal geography. Here, she engenders a new grammar of expression. This is Abou Zannad’s mode, forming to grasp feminine desire: an intensity of wanting, subdued and suppressed in ordinary life. Her work is scented by this desire, propelling itself into legibility. First, as the scripting of her objects and productions; next, as the gleaning-work, of deciphering the possible contours of ‘feminine’ language. Abou Zannad’s practice is immersed in the human compulsion to tell and be ‘told,’ to embody and be disembodied—to mark, mar, and palimpsest. Abou Zannad graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Sharjah, in 2021. In 2023, she founded lineعلىـline, an early career writing support service for emerging creative practitioners. Her work has been featured in In-Habit, an exhibition culminating the first edition of the Peer Review Program by Engage101; While the Coffee Grounds Settle at Fathom Gallery, Georgetown in Washington DC; and at Rewaq Gallery in Sharjah.