COBRA

Elizabeth Xi Bauer is pleased to present COBRA, an exhibition of new works by Shadi Al-Atallah, a London-based Saudi artist known for emotionally charged figurative paintings that inhabit liminal spaces between intimacy and conflict. While themes of identity, queerness, and spirituality remain central to his practice, COBRA marks a striking transformation—shifting from the painterly to the immersive, from the singular image to a multi-sensory world of video, sound, object, and light. 

Al-Atallah’s figures—often genderless, fragmented, or in states of transformation—resist binary readings and evoke a terrain of contradictions. Drawing on religious mythology, literature, science, and gender theory, his visual language returns to the body: naked, unbound, and in motion.  

At the centre of COBRA are three large-scale video projections cast onto suspended curtains of fabric that curve and ripple through the gallery like the body of a serpent. These moving images draw from Al-Atallah’s research into archival footage of queer men and transfeminine people in Saudi Arabia dancing together—intimate, spontaneous gestures of joy, affection, and defiance. The footage, sourced from digital archives, speaks to lost histories and fragile forms of visibility. The exhibition title takes its name from the online alias COBRA, belonging to one of those featured in the footage, whom Al-Atallah later discovered, through comments online, had passed away.