Zaina El-Said
Zaina El-Said is a graduate of AIU London and a digital collage artist based in Amman, Jordan. With over a decade of practice, she has held more than ten solo exhibitions and participated in over twenty international group shows and biennales across the Middle East, Europe, and Russia. Her work is included in public and private collections, including the Durham University collection in the UK and the Aga Khan Museum, Canada. Recent projects include Hjeini (Jordan), and Native Codes (Russia), which examine memory, and cultural evolution and continuity through layered visual and symbolic narratives. El-Said’s digital collage practice is rooted in archival excavation and visual reconstruction. Working with vintage photography, historical ephemera, scanned textures, and ornamental motifs, she digitally assembles and deconstructs imagery into carefully constructed compositions. Her collages function as visual spaces—almost architectural in nature- where surface, image, and ornament intersect. Through this process, her work explores Circassian, Bedouin, and broader world folk traditions, engaging with ancient philosophies and worldviews while remaining in dialogue with contemporary visual culture. Alongside this, she maintains an ongoing pop-art tribute series to Arab divas, reframing cinema and collective memory through bold, graphic interventions. Drawing from mythology, pagan folk traditions, and imagined realms of bygone ages, El-Said explores themes of shapeshifting, time travel, and hybrid identities. Ritual, costume, and ornament serve as central visual languages in her work, understood as carriers of ancestral knowledge. Through digital collage, she seeks to preserve, translate, and recontextualize cultural codes for contemporary audiences. Her work occupies a space between the familiar and the uncanny—rooted in historical archives while opening onto speculative, dreamlike worlds.