We had the pleasure to visit Carte Blanche at Alliance Française Dubai. It is a group show by the artist collective “Féminin Pluriel”. The exhibition opens with a wall text at the entrance that asks a single, defining question: What happens when artists are given complete freedom?

The collective, with a total of 8 artists, including 2 Guests of honor, displayed a range of materials, all depicting the ultimate feminine touches, as well showing what women in art can achieve. 

The question behind the show

Carte Blanche brings together distinct artistic visions, personal stories and different ways of working with materials and techniques. It names the themes: light and shadow, contrast and texture. The show invites visitors to discover new ways of seeing.

The exhibition calls everyone for an exploration of possibility, individuality and the unexpected.

Meet Féminin Pluriel

Féminin Pluriel is a collective of French-speaking artists. It was founded in Dubai in 2020. Creativity and cultural exchange hold the group together.

Six permanent members are listed:

• Agnes Sheikh
• Alexandra Raynaud
• Alison Ladegaillerie
• Bénédicte Joland-Chazaelle
• Bianca Dolman
• Valérie Manouvrier

Together they work in painting, photography, ceramics, drawing and mixed media. Alliance Française Dubai has supported the collective since 2022. Carte Blanche is its return to the institution. This isn’t the group’s first show at the venue.

Guest of Honour: Khalil Abdulwahid Hassan

One of the Guests of Honour is an acclaimed Emirati artist and Senior Consultant in Visual Arts at Dubai Culture, a painter and video artist from Dubai who began at Al Marsam Al Hur in 1990 under Hassan Sharif and has managed visual arts at the Authority since 2008. His work is known for strong colour on dark grounds, with experimental video that builds visual metaphors around culture and environment.

His artworks were a series of spotlights on 4 different established local and international artists (Patricia Millns, Dr. Najat Makki, Noujoum El Ghanem, Benedicte Gimonnet). His intent was showing how those artists formed a driving force in the art scene. 

Guest of Honour: Patricia Millns FRSA

The second Guest of Honour, Patricia Millns FRSA, a multidisciplinary artist who has helped shape the UAE’s contemporary scene. Born in Nottingham in 1950 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, she has lived in the region for over 40 years; an artist, advisor and mentor with a BA Honours in Fine Art and an MA in Art and Design History, and an honorary member of Tashkeel. Her practice moves freely across materials, built on repetition and seriality with the circle as a constant motif,  her work is described as meditative, spiritual and feminine, linking the circle to women and the cycle of life, and seen most recently in space between at Maraya Art Centre.

Artists: 

Agnes Sheikh is a mixed media artist based in Dubai since 2004. A former visual arts teacher, she became a full-time artist in 2020 and co-founded the collective Féminin Pluriel in 2021. Her practice centers on close up views of UAE flora, capturing their fragile beauty through detailed and realistic work. With TRESHOLDS OF LIGHT for Carte Blanche, she shifts focus to pure light and the mangrove ecosystem. Using low angle perspectives, she blends printmaking, laser cutting, embroidery on canvas and organza, and LED lighting to let illumination break through and define the space. Since 2024, French knots have become central to her process, acting as listening devices that trace the hidden voices of the mangroves. Light becomes negative space, foliage and texture turn luminous, and the weightless quality of organza brings transparency to the forest. The result is quiet and immersive, a tactile study of how light shapes what we see and feel.

Alexandra Raynaud is a French photographer and visual artist whose life across Paris, London, New York, Mexico City, Dubai, Sydney and now Shanghai shapes how she sees place and memory. Born in Greece and based in Dubai since 2013, she works without formal training, led by instinct and curiosity as she layers colour, light and texture to turn architecture into visual narrative. Her work MOSAIC MIND revisits eight photographs from her 2021 archive of the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, weaving stark white concrete with delicate blue mosaics warmed by sun. The layered geometry draws from Islamic art to evoke unity and infinity, softening structure into quiet harmony and giving the building space for imagination to move. Printed on textured fine art paper, the limited-edition piece invites a closer, more tactile read of repetition, balance and detail.

Alison Ladegaillerie is a French ceramist based in Dubai since 2013. A former shiatsu practitioner, she left the practice to devote herself fully to porcelain, blending sensitivity with technical mastery to create organic, poetic forms that balance fragility and strength. Her current work explores vibration, turning emotion and the subtle energies of life into sculptural movement. For Carte Blanche, she presents BUTTERFLIES, three porcelain pieces suspended between flight and stillness. Each wing is built from layered paper porcelain petals edged in silver leaf, catching the light with a delicate shimmer. For her, the flutter of a wing becomes a breath or a ripple, an imperceptible movement born in silence that spreads like emotion through space. Together, the three works compose a quiet dance that invites you to slow down and feel the invisible connections that unite us.

Bénédicte Joland Chazelle is a French painter and psychomotor therapist based in Dubai. Trained in artists’ studios in France and Italy, she works in oil, acrylic and mixed media, exploring the space between emotion, perception and creativity. Her paintings return often to nature and places that feel personal, from trees and mythological figures to landscapes shaped by memory. For Carte Blanche, she presents AS IF IN A DREAM, a series of 17 small, luminous spheres inspired by the souvenir globe. Each round painting cradles a fragment of the United Arab Emirates, from palm trees and water to desert, sky and the mineral mountains of Hatta. Using trompe l’oeil, the surface becomes image and object at once, bending light to reveal and magnify the land like a tender recollection. Installed across the wall, the glossy globes feel almost weightless, each one a capsule of memory suspended between the real and the imagined.

Bianca Dolman is a self-taught French mixed media artist who has been based in Dubai since 2013. Guided by instinct and curiosity, her practice evolved naturally toward mixed media, layering epoxy resin, paint, glue and gold leaf to build texture and depth. Her series LUMINOUS continues that exploration of circles, repetition and balance. White spheres sit in a regular grid to create rhythm and order, while a few irregular gold patterned forms break the repetition and add contrast. The resin gives her surfaces a smooth, glossy finish, and the gold brings warmth and movement. Through small shifts in material and texture, she turns a simple form into something luminous and contemporary.

Valerie Manouvrier, known as Manou, is a Belgian contemporary ballpoint pen artist who has called the UAE home for more than ten years. She takes a tool meant for writing words and turns it into something else entirely, building images with kilometers of ink in vibrant, pop inspired colour. Her obsession with the medium started after a 2014 visit to the BIC® factory in South Africa, and she was invited to join BIC’s Art Foundation Committee in 2017. Her work CHROMÉ shows it best. A croissant rendered in chrome and stamped with Chanel’s logo becomes an icon of luxury, caught mid bite as if time stopped. Set against black and white with flecks of gold, it asks how luxury reshapes what we value and turns something ordinary into an object of desire.

The opening was a celebration of colors, delicatesse, nostalgia, a mixture of old school manual repetition and ingenious ideas that only adventurous souls dare trying. Mixing light, paper installation, ceramic as canvas and other ideas reminds us of why art is important, and how to push the limit of material beyond its capacity.