Series overview:

Tales of the Souk positions Kuwait’s Al-Mubarakiya not as a backdrop but as a protagonist, a body animated by circulation, exchange, and memory. In Ali Alamdar’s hands, the souk becomes an organism whose arteries are alleys, whose lifeblood is human interaction, and whose soul is carried in objects charged with ritual and use. Each painting isolates a fragment, the butcher, the tailor, the gold merchant, the café, but together they cohere into a living portrait of a system in perpetual motion.

For Alamdar, this project is both excavation and invention. Having grown between Kuwait and Houston, he approaches the souk as a site of estrangement and belonging at once. Rather than treat it as ethnographic record or nostalgic emblem, he renders it as a stage where objects and gestures transcend their material role. Gold is not ornament but a language of love and celebration, bukhoor is not smoke but hospitality turned visible, the misbah not beads but confidence and prayer bound in one. In this way, each object becomes a portrait, each stall a psyche, each transaction a myth.

The series resists the comfort of heritage by refusing to flatten the souk into symbol. Instead, it insists on its vitality, its imperfections, its simultaneity of past and present. Tales of the Souk argues that place itself can be portraiture, and that portraiture can extend beyond the figure to encompass the architectures, objects, and rituals that carry the weight of identity. It is both local and universal: rooted in the specificity of Kuwait, but articulated through an artistic language sharpened in Houston, where Alamdar’s visual imagination was formed