'sweltering drive', Razan AlSarraf’s latest body of work, begins with a place that is at once familiar and ungraspable: Shuwaikh, Kuwait’s oldest inhabited neighborhood, its main port, and a terrain of relentless industrial churn.
Over the summer of 2025, AlSarraf repeatedly traversed this dense environment, enduring its heat and dust while attending to its infrastructures, activities, and rhythms. These drives became both fieldwork and ritual, immersing the artist in a landscape where movement, commerce, and construction never seem to pause.
From this embodied practice emerges a visual language that is as layered as Shuwaikh itself. Asphalt patterns, fractured walls, and the residues of fire appear in her drawings; ink paintings register the restless flows of cars, smoke, and industrial atmosphere; while video interlaces the artist’s own footage with found material, tethering abstraction to lived histories. Each work charts the marks left by circulation, extraction, and endurance, insisting that surfaces we overlook—the grocery store floor, a wall shielding an electrical outpost, the scars of a road—hold within them an archive of collective experience.
If AlSarraf’s earlier practice was anchored in the relationship between land and abstraction, 'sweltering drive' extends this inquiry into the infrastructures that shape contemporary life. Shuwaikh becomes a lens through which global systems of logistics, labor, and inequity are made visible, yet also a portrait of local resilience, where the ordinary and the monumental intertwine. The fires she documents, whether rumored arson or unexplained blazes, become metaphors for opacity and instability; while cart wheels, marble, and smoke collapse into maps of everyday persistence.
The works gathered here are not simply representations of place but propositions for how place is made and remade. By rendering Shuwaikh through drawing, painting, and video, AlSarraf transforms the oppressive experience of driving through industrial density into a mode of critical reflection. The “sweltering drive” becomes an act of witnessing, one that reveals both the fragility and tenacity of the environments we inhabit.
In reframing Kuwait’s industrial heartland as a site of abstraction, memory, and speculation, AlSarraf invites us to consider the infrastructures that govern our own lives, and the ways in which they inscribe themselves onto our bodies, movements, and imaginations. 'sweltering drive' is less a portrait of a neighborhood than an open question: how might we learn to see, and perhaps to reimagine, the worlds built beneath our tires and above our heads?
By Océane Sailly
