Meet Maryam and Latifa
Maraj is a Bahrain-based architecture and design practice, research platform, and educational space founded by Maryam Aljomairi and Latifa Alkhayat. Its work centers on material-led experimentation, exploring how materials can be reimagined through emerging technologies, local ecologies, labor practices, and inherited knowledge. Through research, making, and spatial practice, Maraj seeks to contribute to architectural culture in the Gulf and beyond while foregrounding regional conditions, resources, and alternative approaches to building.
Key Projects
- Sweating Assets - Sweating Assets explores the possibilities within existing systems, focusing on the water condensation produced by air-conditioning in Bahrain’s hot and humid climate. Presented in Venice as a microenvironment of temperature, humidity, and condensation, the installation recreated Bahrain’s climatic conditions. Condensation formed on a cooled glass volume and was channelled onto an earthen landscape representing Bahrain’s governorates, highlighting how this unintended by-product could be redirected towards wetlands and agricultural areas in need of replenishment.
- Maritime ART gallery - Inspired by Bahrain’s dhow-building and pearling heritage, the Modern Maritime Art Gallery draws on the form and spirit of traditional wooden vessels. Like the dhows that carried divers to sea and pearls to international markets, the gallery is envisioned as a vessel for artworks shaped by the pearling industry and its people. Its architecture explores a dialogue between compression and release, light and form, within the surrounding residential neighbourhood.
- Stories of the isle and inlet - Saudade explores the memory and changing landscape of Nabih Saleh, an island surrounded by Tubli Bay’s wetlands and Sitra’s industrial sites. Through archival imagery and layered embroidered mesh textiles inspired by thob al nashil, the installation reflects on the island’s rich ecologies, cultural stories, and the threats they face from pollution and dredging.
