Working across painting, installation, video, digital media and text, Al-Atallah examines the ‘meta-data’ of images in an expansive sense – through their emotional weight and associated histories of violence. Working with images drawn from personal and existing archives, press photography, fetish publications and digital sources, he explores how power, desire and violence manifest and co-create meaning. Drawing from mythology and spiritual and religious texts, Al-Atallah creates ambiguous narratives that resist interpretation and operate within a practice of refusal.
Painting is at the core of his practice, acting as a vital reflective stage. Through painting, he ‘spaghettifies’ images – a term, drawn from black hole theory, that he uses to describe his own process of distortion and remaking – using acrylic, ink, oil pastels and chinagraph pencils to create large-scale works that combine figuration and abstraction. In his recent solo exhibition, COBRA at Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Al-Atallah questioned what it means to ‘resurrect’ the archive. Focusing on a folder of found footage depicting gender-transgressive Saudis gathering in secret parties, filmed and posted online with the intention of harm, he examines how surveillance shapes intimacies. Through altered video projections and found object installations, he questions the ethical dilemma of commemorating histories without consent.
Previous solo exhibitions include Hole at Niru Ratnam, London, Rapture at Steve Turner, Los Angeles, and Fistfight at Guts Gallery, London. His work has been shown institutionally at Goldsmiths CCA, London, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, and Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice.
Download CV
Hole, artist’s publication, 2025