What are you working on at the moment that you’re most excited about?
Right now I’m part of a group show in London called “As if the Ground Remembered” at Haricot Gallery, where I have three works. They were produced during a residency I was part of in Scotland from May to June, at Colstoun Arts. It’s by invitation only, and they take one artist a month, so you spend one or two months creating work in the middle of nowhere, in a castle, surrounded by forest, a river, horses and farms. The fact that I was invited this year was the summer vacation I’ve always wanted, and I was able to connect with a lot of great people there.
The one I’m most excited about, though, is my first solo exhibition, opening in December at Taymour Grahne Projects in Alserkal Avenue. It’s my first, so I’m really excited for it. We’re going to have around twenty works across two floors of the gallery, and I’m looking forward to coming in with a full body of work. It will be almost like an environment where you see my work adapt in different shapes, forms and colours; and how I bring two, three or four paintings together in one space.
I had a glimpse of that at Art Dubai, where I had my first solo booth. There was a harmony to it, a wave of these paintings coming together. Now we’re building on that, bringing all of those elements into one huge space and seeing how they come together. I’m as excited as the audience is, because I’m also seeing it come to life.
Much of your work is about places that documentation overlooks. What falls into that gap?
I can give an example from my role as a researcher at Al Mawrid, an archival research centre that is part of NYU Abu Dhabi. One of our goals as a team is to document Arab artist archives and share them with the world.
A lot of researchers write about Picasso, about Matisse, and if they were to talk about Arab artists, they would usually go to Egypt or Jordan. Elsewhere it’s harder. In Iraq, archives aren’t very accessible, or they were destroyed. In the Gulf states, maybe a lot of them were overlooked, or maybe they weren’t thought of as important to represent.
So we digitise these collections and archives for accessibility, and have the materials online as an open data source, with finding aids, so that researchers around the world can not only learn about these artists but also write about them. We also work with NYU Abu Dhabi to maintain the archives, so that hopefully nothing can ever destroy these resources.
My role as a researcher is to start that process, by writing about these artists, getting them into published journals, and hopefully having other researchers do the same, so that these Arab artists are put on the stage as part of global art.
Where can people find these archives?
We’re online, so people can look us up and see our finding aids, along with all of the collections we’ve finished digitising. Part of the archive is available online, and you can reach out to us to use these images in your research, or just to learn. But a huge part of it is private images, private letters and private correspondence.
So a lot of researchers reach out to us by email, letting us know what they need, and then we host them at our centre at NYU Abu Dhabi. We have a laptop there with the archives ready. No phones are allowed, but you have a notepad and a pen, so you can take notes and make sure you have everything you need for your research paper or project.
Being part of an academic institution really helps with the safety and the maintenance of our archive. We’re not a private entity; we’re part of an academic beating heart, and that also aids our longevity and our strength as a resource that can be trusted.
What does that work actually involve?
We connect with the artists themselves, or with their custodians. If the artist is still alive, we collaborate with them directly, and if they’re no longer with us, we talk to their families or custodians and we tackle their archives.
Usually there’s a lot of very impressive knowledge in them. First editions of journals and magazines, the first ever edition of a specific exhibition at a society, or even a founding society. A lot of slides, a lot of photographs, and a lot of letters, from back when emails weren’t a thing and you’d have to write a letter to the ministry to open an exhibition. It’s enriching material, and we try to share it with the world.
What makes us special is that we don’t take the archive away from the artist. We digitise it and return it, or we send our archivists to scan the objects, the images, the photographs and the letters where they are. One of our main goals is not to take an archive out of its home unless it’s endangered, or unless it no longer has a home. If a custodian doesn’t want to keep an archive, they might donate it to us, and then we house the collection in the special collections at NYU, where it’s temperature protected.
Otherwise, we don’t buy archives, and we don’t do conservation. If something is damaged and scanning it would damage it further, we don’t touch it. We try to be as respectful of the home of the archive as we can, and just work digitally, which also means we don’t overwhelm our own space and team.
You work with rocks from the mountains, sikham charcoal and snaah. Why those materials, rather than paint alone?
I had this need to go deeper than what is just shown and what is just seen. I didn’t want to be labelled as only a landscape painter, so I wanted to figure out a way to work with what this landscape represents rather than what it looks like.
That’s how I tapped into the idea of using scent, to show me how a landscape feels, or how I feel in a certain space. I went with materials that represent the landscape rather than simply what is found there. I use sikham because it was produced in that specific location, or because that’s what the location is known for. And I use snaah because my association with a space is its scent. It was another method to go deeper into the scene and the space.
Whose work has stayed with you, and shaped how you work?
I look a lot at Abdullah Al Saadi’s work, at his take on the landscape and the land, and how he works with the environment that surrounds him. He was a major inspiration, and he still is.
I was lucky enough to be part of the Venice cohort that went to help represent him and manage the pavilion, so I was seeing his work on a daily basis for a month or so. I also had access to his publication throughout those days, reading about him, his journey, his life and his biography. All of that, and being able to help represent his work, really enriched what I do.
What would be lost if someone saw your paintings as scenery alone?
Perhaps just the endless connection between man and land, the magic that happens between a person and the ancestral generations before him. That genuine connection is super special, almost magical, and I think that’s what they would lose, because that’s what I’m trying to translate with my paintings.
You can’t separate land from man, or man from land. Making the land an active participant is what I’m trying to portray. I want people to feel that, and to feel that there is this life cycle, that we are made from land just to go back to it.
I’m also trying to challenge the idea that aridness means not rich, or not as great, or not as beautiful. I’m trying to portray this, quote unquote, aridness as something that is still of value and still beautiful. That’s why I paint these places, and why I try to translate that beauty to the audience.
How does the work travel? When you show it abroad, what do you find yourself explaining?
There isn’t anything new that I explain abroad, because a lot of the local community don’t know what snaah is or what sikham is either. I end up explaining the same things to both, even to people who are Emirati, because these elements are very specific to a certain area. There’s no shame, and nothing bad to say about the local community for not knowing these things. I didn’t know them until recently myself. I’m still learning, my community is still learning, and I’m teaching them as I learn. I’m just trying to shed light on these very special things that maybe aren’t widely known, and that’s basically my goal.
A lot of people relate to my paintings in terms of material and technique. The best example would be a collector of mine from Beijing, who founded a museum there. He really loved two of my paintings and related them to Chinese scrolls and traditional Chinese painting on natural linen. For him it touched a memory.
I play a lot with medium and with orientation, painting on circle canvases and extremely slim canvases, and I think those elements touch people in different ways, even if they’ve never been to the UAE, or never thought about its landscapes.
Who else in the UAE should we be looking at right now?
A lot of artists from my generation. Safeya Al Awadhi is an artist I’m very much in contact with, and we jump ideas off each other and inspire each other in many ways. Salmah Al Mansoori is another artist who is trying to challenge a lot of the same things I’m tackling, but from her hometown in Liwa. She’s looking at those lost memories as well.
She’s an artist I really look up to, and I think she would feel the same about me. We’re the same generation, doing almost the same things, but in different ways, from different perspectives and different locations. I see her almost as a peer who is helping me push away these stereotypes, these specific ways our locations and our environments are being seen and perceived, and I think I’m also helping her fight back these perspectives.
So many from my generation, Emirati women as well, are really trying to put the UAE on the map, through the way we think and the way we show our culture and our lifestyle, in very special and unique ways. I think everyone in my generation is super inspiring.
