Artist Bouthayna Al Muftah Talks Bridging Cross-Cultural Dialogues through the Lady Dior

Dior Lady Art

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series themed around the seventh edition of Dior Lady Art and hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this year’s event, 11 artists from around the world have participated in a game of metamorphosis by rendering the iconic Lady Dior handbag as a unique piece of art.

In this episode we’ll be hearing from Qatari artist Bouthayna Al Muftah, a multidisciplinary artist whose universe centres on the collective memory of her country and the people who shaped it through oral history, song, poetry and folklore. The artist’s methods range from painting to photography, printmaking, photographic performance series and video as well as typographic work linked to archiving the past.

For her reinterpretation of the Lady Dior bag, Al Muftah, an alumna of the Virginia Commonwealth

University School of the Arts in Qatar who was tapped to design the Official Poster for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, explored the idea of a conceptual book taking shape. Chiffon is the dominant material, printed with Arabic typography using words from folkloric songs and poetry.

“With my work I always talk about how we carry our memories with us, how we become our memories and how we wear them, as well as how relics carrying those stories can be passed down in families,” says the artist. “Here, the bag is also an object that is being passed down, that holds memories and carries them.”

Tune into the episode to learn more about this poetic Dior Lady Art journey from the artist herself.