If the Moon Were a Canvas: How Middle Eastern Women Artists Turn Speculative Art into Vision and Voice

Anisa Mosaiebiniya
Oct 13
3 min read

Speculative Art as Resistance: Middle Eastern Women Artists Reimagine Space and Memory

In the expanding field of speculative art, Middle Eastern women artists are pushing the limits of visibility and geography. Their practices rooted in craft, language, and diaspora demonstrate how imagination becomes a political act.

For many Middle Eastern women artists, speculative art is not escapism. It is resistance rendered in dust, geometry, and silence.

These projects imagine the Moon as a gallery for speculative art—a stage where the work of Middle Eastern women artists can exist beyond borders and gravity.

1. Manal AlDowayan (Saudi Arabia)

Real Practice: Her installations, maps, and archival constructions make absence visible. She has documented women whose names have disappeared from public record—women who were prevented from travel, from rights, from being counted.Lunar Proposal: On the Moon, AlDowayan imagines inscribing the erased women’s names into sunlit crater rims using pearlescent dust. These names would arc across lunar plains like constellations, linked by fine lines of reflected pigment. A mirror disk would reflect Earthlight through the arcs, stitching each name to memory on Earth. The result: a constellation of women made permanent in lunar silence.Why It Resonates: Her work insists that what disappears may still persist; she frames absence as territory.

2. Dana Awartani (Saudi / Palestinian descent)

Real Practice: Awartani elegantly fuses geometry, religious heritage, and abstraction. Her practice reinvents decorative forms by parsing sacred grids—she translates craft into critical architecture.Lunar Proposal: She proposes a tessellated geometric field etched into lunar regolith, radiating from a central hub. The design would merge Arabic ornament, sacred geometry, and astro-cartography—lines that pulse with Earth’s orbit. By day, sunlight would cause the lines to glow faintly; by lunar dusk, shadows would sharpen the pattern’s depth. As visitors walk through it, their silhouettes become part of the geometry.Why It Resonates: Her work already navigates formal language and spatial memory; she converts decorative systems into conceptual fields.

3. Shadia Alem (Saudi Arabia)

Real Practice: Alem constructs poetic installations that transform negative space, arches, and form into emotional architecture. Her work often evokes absence, threshold, and poetic silence.Lunar Proposal: She imagines carving gracious arches into crater walls—empty alcoves that frame Earth across vistas. Within these recesses, she would embed reflective panels that catch Earth's glow, creating windows of presence in lunar darkness. The piece would fold void and reflection into a liminal passage between Earth and Moon.Why It Resonates: Her installations already invite movement, reflection, and silences; on the Moon, she would construct portals between worlds.

4. Rana Samara (Palestine / Diaspora)

Real Practice: Samara paints landscapes of memory, the body, and landscapes of loss. Her work holds spaces of intimacy and distance.Lunar Proposal: She may sketch a map of the body in fine relief, spreading from one crater’s lip to another—handprints, veins, footprints. These biomorphic etchings would catch shadows at certain angles, turning lunar plains into a corporeal topography. Visitors would walk through memory.Why It Resonates: Her art traces the internal and external landscapes of displacement; she remaps absence into presence.

5. Aisha Khalid (Pakistan / In Regional MENA Networks)

Real Practice: Khalid transforms miniature traditions into expansive public art, weaving detail into grand registers. Her pieces move between the intimate and the monumental.Lunar Proposal: She envisages repeating motifs—pomegranates, stars, interlocking geometry—scaled across a plateau. At close proximity, each motif reads as intimate pattern; from afar, they coalesce into a radiant field of form. In daylight, the motifs shimmer; in lunar twilight, the lines sharpen into constellation-like glyphs.Why It Resonates: Her practice already traverses micro to macro, pattern to statement; she draws the eye into both detail and vista.

6. Bonus Voices: Expanding the Moon’s Chorus

Shirin Neshat (Iran / USA): Known for stitching Persian poems onto portraits and using dual-channel video, she might project calligraphy or voice across lunar plains, layering text over land.
Mounira Al Solh (Lebanon / Netherlands): Her textile practice and stories of displacement could imagine quilts of lunar dust, sewn across craters.
Samia Halaby (Palestine / global): A pioneer of abstraction in Arab art, she could paint energetic lunar fields, color zones that evoke planetary atmospheres.

Conclusion: The Moon as Mirror, Map, Memory

As speculative as this prompt is, the responses are deeply tethered to what these artists already practice: memory, absence, scale, craft, and voice. By imagining art on the Moon, we push the frame: what does inscription become when wind cannot erase? What histories survive beyond gravity?

This exercise invites audiences to read their practice anew. We see AlDowayan’s maps in dust, Samara’s body-maps in topography, Awartani’s geometry as cosmic architecture. The Moon becomes a silent archive, one that listens rather than conquers.

Call to Action: Explore these artists' real work. Visit their exhibitions, read their statements, and let these lunar ideas redirect how you look at Earth’s art.