Zeinab Saleh was born in Kenya in 1996. She studied at London’s the Royal Drawing School (2014–15) and the Slade School of Fine Art (2016–19). As co-founder of the London artists' collective, the Muslim Sisterhood, Saleh is a pioneer for genuine diversity and promotes Muslim visibility and creativity in the art world.
Artist Zeinab Saleh was born in Kenya in 1996. She moved to London, England, and studied for a Fine Art Foundation Degree at the Royal Drawing School in London between 2014 and 2015, followed by a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL) between 2016 and 2019, where she was awarded the Prankerd-Jones Memorial Prize in 2018. Saleh’s work consists of drawings, paintings (and occasionally video work), using ‘acrylic, charcoal and chalk to conjure moments of softness and tenderness. Eyes, swans and snakes often reappear in the work’ (Artist’s Website). Her work also draws on VHS tapes of home video footage and music, offering ‘a backdrop of accumulated personal histories, holding an aura that links the personal to the collective’ (UCL Profile).
Very soon after embarking on her BFA, Saleh started exhibiting widely in London. In 2017, she showed in the group exhibition, Ain’t I Beautiful, at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, which aimed to open up a discussion and challenge notions of what gives something the power of ‘beauty’. The same year, together with Sara Gulamali and Lamisa Khan she co-founded the Muslim Sisterhood, a London-based artistic collective that aims to highlight genuine diversity rather than tokenism, creating ‘spaces of radical joy for young Muslims through their work in photography, fashion, art direction and publishing’ (Whitechapel Gallery). Muslim Sisterhood was then invited to exhibit at London’s prestigious Friday Lates at the V&A in 2018. Their evening, Snap, was held in collaboration with i-D magazine and was curated by Jenna Mason, and explored how moments are created, preserved and collected in the click of a shutter. Saleh then curated Widening the Gaze at the Slade Research Centre, also in 2018, and continued to exhibit in group shows, such as the two-person show, Condo London, alongside Yuko Mohri at mother’s tankstation, London in early 2020.
In late 2021, Saleh held her first solo exhibition, Softest place (on earth), at Camden Art Centre, London (later shown at Château Shatto, Los Angeles, USA in 2022). The charcoal drawings represented a new body of work which meditated on the condition of stillness imposed by the pandemic, and Saleh created muted colours, fluid lines and forms by removing layers of charcoal from the canvases (Camden Art Centre, YouTube). In 2022, Collective Moments: Muslim Sisterhood Takeover was presented at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in which Saleh showed a four-minute film, 4 star wedding, in which digitised VHS tapes from her family archive were combined with new imagery and music.
Zeinab Saleh lives and works in London, with a studio at Gasworks. In addition to exhibiting, she has talked and presented on numerous occasions, including in conversations and panels that address culture, race, and women in art, and in Contemporary Art Lectures at UCL. Through the Museum Sisterhood, Vogue reported, Saleh has contributed to the creation of ‘a new and authentic language in British visual culture that is historically more comfortable with images of Muslim women as news items rather than as the authors and subjects of visual art’ (Khaireh, 2021). Her work is not currently represented in UK public collections.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Zeinab Saleh]
Publications related to [Zeinab Saleh] in the Ben Uri Library