How to Tell a Story: Travelling Images, Iconography and Historical Fiction

With Alla Abdunabi
Ages 18+
In English
 

Delve into the art of storytelling through images, objects and iconography. Examine how narratives can be built directly from visual material in a process involving both selection and omission. Guiding you in this study will be artistic and museological methodologies, theories of image migration and historical fiction.

This seminar interrogates image-based research as a process of uncovering, assembling and, at times, producing forms of truth. Through lectures and close readings of images, you will trace how meaning shifts across contexts and assess existing models of visual narrative construction. Then you will apply these models in practice, considering how fiction operates as a critical tool for engaging with truth, memory, and institutional storytelling.

All participants are asked to bring a either a laptop or an iPad. 

This session is free, and all other materials are provided.

Sharjah Art Foundation is committed to making its programmes inclusive and accessible. You can arrange for any support needed through the registration form.

For more information, email learning@sharjahart.org, or call (06) 544 4113.

About Alla Abdunabi

Alla Abdunabi is a visual artist working in sculpture and installation. Her practice explores the material afterlives of objects through a mode of storytelling that merges the auto-ethnographical, historical and fictional. She has had solo exhibitions at 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi, and Abu Dhabi Art Fair (both 2025). Her work has also been shown in group presentations at Green Art Gallery, Isola Space, Rizq Art Gallery, NYUAD Project Space, Foundry, Jameel Arts Centre, Bayt Al Mamzar and Alserkal Arts Foundation in the UAE and Dream City Festival in Tunis. Abdunabi has participated in study and residency programmes in Doha, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.