Book Launch: Footnotes to a Typology of Laundry Stands
Meeting with the artist Rabila Kidwai
Join us for the launch of Footnotes to a Typology of Laundry Stands (self-published) and a conversation with the artist Rabila Kidwai.
This book is a collection of footnotes to the drawing series A Typology of Laundry Stands, a set of drawings each depicting a laundry stand birthed domestically through notoriously makeshift ways. The drawings explore how inhabitants habitually exceed the intended functions of the spaces that contain them. Within the urban condition of Dubai’s apartment blocks, the simple act of drying clothes is a negotiated one, dictated by the spatial contours of the apartment itself. The drawings reflect a specific vernacular of everyday resourcefulness common to a demographic that belongs to the more crowded part of the city.
The footnotes compiled in the book operate as manuals for these drawings, framing the hybrid forms as functional objects. The manuals produce a set of affordances, suggesting how these hybrid forms might be handled, imagined, or enacted. Drawing on Gibson's theory of affordances, the footnotes establish the relational possibilities between object and viewer, inviting audiences to perceive the drawings not as static images, but as entities with latent capacities for use and interaction. In this way, the meanings of these everyday objects emerge through the actions they appear to invite.
Rabila Kidwai is a UAE-based visual artist and designer from Pakistan whose work explores the poetics of gendered and collective spaces. Her practice draws on the urban environment as a site of spatial bricolage, documenting the quiet negotiations of everyday life and conditions of close domestic proximity. Working across visual art, film, and publishing, Kidwai maintains an artistically driven design practice grounded in arts and culture, with a sustained interest in print and independent modes of production. She is a recipient of the Studio Support Program at Dom Art Projects and Shaikha Salama Emerging Artist Fellowship 2024–2025.
This book is a collection of footnotes to the drawing series A Typology of Laundry Stands, a set of drawings each depicting a laundry stand birthed domestically through notoriously makeshift ways. The drawings explore how inhabitants habitually exceed the intended functions of the spaces that contain them. Within the urban condition of Dubai’s apartment blocks, the simple act of drying clothes is a negotiated one, dictated by the spatial contours of the apartment itself. The drawings reflect a specific vernacular of everyday resourcefulness common to a demographic that belongs to the more crowded part of the city.
The footnotes compiled in the book operate as manuals for these drawings, framing the hybrid forms as functional objects. The manuals produce a set of affordances, suggesting how these hybrid forms might be handled, imagined, or enacted. Drawing on Gibson's theory of affordances, the footnotes establish the relational possibilities between object and viewer, inviting audiences to perceive the drawings not as static images, but as entities with latent capacities for use and interaction. In this way, the meanings of these everyday objects emerge through the actions they appear to invite.
Rabila Kidwai is a UAE-based visual artist and designer from Pakistan whose work explores the poetics of gendered and collective spaces. Her practice draws on the urban environment as a site of spatial bricolage, documenting the quiet negotiations of everyday life and conditions of close domestic proximity. Working across visual art, film, and publishing, Kidwai maintains an artistically driven design practice grounded in arts and culture, with a sustained interest in print and independent modes of production. She is a recipient of the Studio Support Program at Dom Art Projects and Shaikha Salama Emerging Artist Fellowship 2024–2025.
DATE
July 10, 2026, 3:30PM
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