Designer by training, artist by design, Rabila Kidwai is interested in space and the physical beings and objects that occupy it. Her journey started on a Dubai train, while commuting daily in rush hour to work and back, when she began observing women struggling to find room in confined vessels. In this shared public space, she was overwhelmed by unspoken courtesy among female passengers that she imagined made them a unit until they parted at their destinations. Kidwai’s destination, a small apartment she shared with her three sisters and mother.

Having lived in the apartment for fourteen years, she witnessed the space shrink overtime as her family grew and crowded common areas. In Apartment 108, Kidwai documents this ongoing process in a series of monochromatic ink on paper drawings, where she isolates objects, rooms, or people, placing emphasis on the negative space they have yet to occupy. When she and her family decided to move, the artist foreshadowed her nostalgia and began documenting every little detail of that space. The hundreds of drawings then naturally developed into animation videos. She explains, “I felt my work was already a narrative, that is telling a story so movement came naturally to it. I thought I could expand on this idea of expanding and shrinking in space in a video form”.