Aseel AlYaqoub Wins the Seventh Ithra Art Prize

A herbarium of plants that never quite existed

Congratulations are in order for Kuwaiti artist Aseel AlYaqoub, who has just been named the winner of the seventh Ithra Art Prize. The award was announced on 1 October 2026 at a ceremony at Ithra in Dhahran, and it comes with a grant of USD 100,000 to support her practice. What's more, her winning work, Flora Incognita (2026), will enter Ithra's permanent collection.

For anyone less familiar with it, the Ithra Art Prize was launched in 2017 by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra), the Aramco initiative in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, and is now held every two years. It is open to artists from, or based in, one of the 22 Arab countries, and it has quickly become one of the most significant awards for contemporary art in the MENA region. Previous winners include Ayman Zedani, Daniah AlSaleh, Fahad bin Naif, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Adel Abidin and Obaid Alsafi.

Encouragingly, this edition was more generous than ever. The open call drew more than 500 submissions, and for the first time Ithra gave production grants to all five shortlisted finalists, whose new works have been on show together at the Ithra Museum since August.

So what exactly is Flora Incognita? Described by Ithra as "a botanical herbarium of hybrid desert plants examining how classification systems shaped and reshaped knowledge of the Gulf," the installation brings together 3D-printed plant sculptures, steel cabinets and graphite drawings. According to the exhibition text quoted by Arab News, the work "revisits the history of botanical classification in the Gulf and the systems that sought to stabilize it." Its plants "exist in a state of suspension, neither fully native nor entirely foreign, neither wholly authentic nor entirely invented," and the whole piece asks how "systems of documentation quietly determine what is seen, remembered, and accepted as real." In other words, it is a work about who gets to describe a place, which feels like a very fitting question for an artist from our region to be asking.

Born in Kuwait in 1986, and now based in Kuwait City, AlYaqoub is an artist and writer who studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and Pratt Institute in New York. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, video and text, she has long been interested in architecture, history and the symbols and narratives of Kuwaiti nationhood and Arab identity. In 2018 she co-won the first Art Jameel Commission, and in 2021 she co-curated Space Wars, the Kuwait Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. She founded Safat Studios in Kuwait City in 2022, took part in both the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and Desert X AlUla in 2024, and had her first solo exhibition in Europe, The View from Above, at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden, from 2024 to 2025.

The winner was chosen by a jury made up of Farah Abushullaih of Ithra; independent curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh; art historian Dr Nada Shabout, Director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute at the University of North Texas; Jérôme Sans, co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo; and artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke, herself the winner of the fourth edition.

"This year's selection reflects a profound intellectual rigor and creative boldness," says Farah Abushullaih, Programs Manager at Ithra. "The prize serves as a vital platform, bringing innovative ideas and artistic visions into dialogue and shaping the future of contemporary art in the region. By celebrating Aseel AlYaqoub, we are investing in a vision that disrupts conventional narratives and elevates the Saudi cultural landscape to new intellectual heights."

Perhaps most significantly, this is another major prize for a woman artist from the Gulf, and for a practice that is research-heavy, quietly political and deeply rooted in the region's own histories. It's also a reminder of how much Saudi institutions are now investing not only in buying art, but in funding its production. We can't wait to see where AlYaqoub takes the work next.

The exhibition of the seventh Ithra Art Prize finalists, including Flora Incognita, is on view at the Ithra Museum, Dhahran, until March 2027.

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