Elizabeth Xi Bauer is pleased to present COBRA, an exhibition of new works by Shadi Al-Atallah, a London-based Saudi artist known for emotionally charged figurative paintings that inhabit liminal spaces between intimacy and conflict. While themes of identity, queerness, and spirituality remain central to his practice, COBRA marks a striking transformation—shifting from the painterly to the immersive, from the singular image to a multi-sensory world of video, sound, object, and light.
Al-Atallah’s figures—often genderless, fragmented, or in states of transformation—resist binary readings and evoke a terrain of contradictions. Drawing on religious mythology, literature, science, and gender theory, his visual language returns to the body: naked, unbound, and in motion.
At the centre of COBRA are three large-scale video projections cast onto suspended curtains of fabric that curve and ripple through the gallery like the body of a serpent. These moving images draw from Al-Atallah’s research into archival footage of queer men and transfeminine people in Saudi Arabia dancing together—intimate, spontaneous gestures of joy, affection, and defiance. The footage, sourced from digital archives, speaks to lost histories and fragile forms of visibility. The exhibition title takes its name from the online alias COBRA, belonging to one of those featured in the footage, whom Al-Atallah later discovered, through comments online, had passed away.
In COBRA, these fragments of digital memory are heavily reworked and abstracted—transformed into a sensuous chiaroscuro of light and shadow that recalls the expressive brushwork of his paintings. “Although the show is honouring and reinterpreting, haunting is a very important element as well,” the artist explains. “I wanted it to feel like stepping into a portal where time is warped.” The degraded quality of the video and sound underscores this temporal dislocation, evoking what the artist calls a “resurrection of lost digital ghosts.” This sentiment anchors the exhibition’s conceptual stakes, inviting audiences to engage with histories that are both personal and political. These pieces resurrect forgotten images of queer intimacy and transform them into collective memory and embodied presence.
The projections are accompanied by a constellation of sculptural objects—a chair stacked with folded thobes perched on a tile; a stiffened traditional male Arab garment illuminated from within; and a speaker stand with a balloon machine blowing against a drum. These uncanny assemblages act as physical interruptions in the space, guiding movement and framing visibility. Nearby, a new series of acrylic paintings on canvas extends the exhibition’s visual and emotional vocabulary, returning to the body in motion and echoing themes of disappearance and resistance.
Together, the works in COBRA form an immersive installation that dissolves the boundaries between painting, cinema, and performance. Al-Atallah’s world-building invites viewers to inhabit a space where queer histories are simultaneously resurrected and reimagined, and where intimacy and erasure coexist as acts of resistance.
This exhibition is curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes.
