Raja’a Khalid’s practice is concerned with contemporary narratives of class, luxury, and consumer and material cultures, especially those that connect her native Arabian Gulf region with the world at large. She is interested in how current day capitalist economies articulate ‘culture’ and seek out motifs of soft power that reflect on the Gulf’s streaming constructions of heritage, authenticity, wealth, masculinity, sport, game, athleticism, adornment, wellness and wilderness. Outcomes are often sculptural abstractions based on these investigations and mediums employed include industrial processes, systems or rhetoric e.g. patents, wholesale supplies or B2B goods, etc.

Raja’a Khalid (born 1984, Saudi Arabia) is a Dubai-based artist and writer. She received her MFA in Fine Art from Cornell University, where she was also the recipient of the Cornell Council for the Arts Grant in 2013. Recent awards and residencies include the NYU Abu Dhabi FIND Research Fellowship, 2014; the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen International Fellowship for Art and Theory, 2015, and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten Guest Residency, 2015. Her work has been shown in New York, Dubai and Vienna.