It seems Hawally has no intention of leaving this column alone. No sooner had we finished discussing the late artist Ayoub Hussain’s book, Hawally: The Village of Conviviality and Leisure, and the warm flood of memories and comments it drew from people who grew up in the district, than I found myself facing another Hawally story altogether. This time, though, it is being told by a new generation, one attempting to uncover the area’s history through its buildings and streets.<\/p>\n
The story centres on an exhibition titled Hawally Bound, organised by the Promenade Cultural Centre as part of a community initiative launched in collaboration with the Inaratif platform, which is run by the Kuwaiti architect Mishari Al-Najjar and the Bahraini engineer Sara Abdullah. What they built together is a rather lovely project, stretched across five years, aimed at rediscovering the architectural landmarks of Hawally, not merely as stone and concrete, but as evidence of an important chapter in Kuwait’s urban and social history.<\/p>\n
The Arabic title of the project turns on a small and rather beautiful pun: the phrase can mean both “let us take a walk” and “let us walk Hawally.” And the choice of the word carries real meaning. We are accustomed to walking the streets of Hawally in search of a shop, a restaurant, or an errand to complete. But we rarely stop in front of a building to ask who designed it, when it was built, or what it meant to the people of the district in its own time. A building is erected to be a destination that people seek out. Then time passes over it, and it becomes the backdrop we walk through every day without ever seeing.<\/p>\n
The journey began in 2022 with a workshop called The Road to Hawally, in which participants walked the neighbourhood’s streets and translated what they saw into drawings, maps, and art prints.<\/p>\n
In 2023 came Hawally Kitsch, which took as its subject the Alothman Complex, designed by the Polish architect Wojciech Jarz\u0105bek and widely regarded as among the most distinctive buildings in Kuwait for its ornamentation and its unconventional architectural detailing. The participants treated that ornamentation as part of the building’s own language and identity, carving some of its elements and printing them onto fabric. It is worth noting that certain details of the complex’s design were drawn from the minaret of the nearby Alothman Mosque, as though the building carried, in its decorative surfaces, something of its older neighbour’s memory.<\/p>\n
Then came Hawally on the Mind in 2024, devoted to the North and South Nuqra complexes. The workshop took an inventive approach: the two buildings were described to the participants in words alone, and they were asked to draw what they imagined before seeing the buildings themselves. The results were works that set the imagined against the actual, revealing how far a person’s mental picture of a place can drift from the thing itself.<\/p>\n
The year 2025 saw two workshops. The first, Within Al-Rehab, addressed the Al-Rehab Complex, a building that gathered under a single roof the shops selling lighting and chandeliers, toys and electronics, alongside residential flats. Participants expressed their experiences and memories of the place through drawing, writing, and embroidery. The second, Hawally and Chadirji, took on the Al-Hassawi residential complex, whose name is bound to that of the eminent Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji. There, participants documented the complex’s design and the changes it had undergone across roughly fifty years and imagined what its future might hold.<\/p>\n
Finally, the 2026 workshop arrived under the title Now Showing: Al-Andalus, reviving the memory of the Andalus Cinema, once among the best-known landmarks in Hawally before its demolition in the 1990s. Participants worked from old photographs, film posters, and people’s recollections of the place, making from them artworks that restored something of its presence.<\/p>\n
One image in the exhibition’s printed material stopped me: a photograph of the cinema’s interior, its rows of seats, its upper balcony. According to the publication, it was built in 1961 and demolished in 1994, meaning it stood for only thirty-three years. Looking at the picture, I found myself wondering how many Kuwaitis had sat in those seats, and how much laughter and how many memories that hall had held.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the finest thing about this initiative is that it did not settle for looking at architecture as engineering design. It tried instead to connect the building to the human being, and to let young people discover for themselves that every street, every complex, and every square holds a story worth telling. The exhibition was accompanied by a set of handsome publications, among them Hawally Bound and its Arabic counterpart, containing archival photographs, drawings, and architectural information about the buildings the workshops addressed. They are works that deserve recognition and respect.<\/p>\n
But having given that recognition where it is due, allow me to raise the bar a little. Five years of research, walking, and the gathering of photographs and information should not end with a temporary exhibition and a limited run of publications. It deserves to be the beginning of a far broader documentation project: one that tells the history of these buildings, their designers, and their transformations, and that collects the stories of the people who lived in them or worked inside them.<\/p>\n
Buildings preserve the features of a city. People preserve its soul. And if this initiative has succeeded in making young people look at Hawally with different eyes, then the next step is to ensure that what they found is preserved for the generations that follow.<\/p>\n
There is more to say on this, specifically about the role cultural institutions might play in turning initiatives of this kind into projects that keep Kuwait’s memory from slipping away.<\/p>\n
Stay safe.<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It seems Hawally has no intention of leaving this column alone. No sooner had we finished discussing the late artist Ayoub Hussain’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":195991405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[50518586],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swalfi-en"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/scwyUl-261020","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/195991405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8147"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8150,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8147\/revisions\/8150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}