Mohammed Kazem on four decades of pushing the boundaries of Emirati art

Hail pellets broke through the awning. They pierced holes in the corrugated green plastic. Sunlight streamed through the holes the following morning, casting facsimile shapes of light in the shade. To the young Mohammed Kazem, the holes looked like eyes. They were on the blinds, in the shadows on the walls and on the ground, enveloping him from above, from below. The eyes changed as the day progressed. They grimaced. They frowned. They squinted as if mid-laugh. The setting and its interconnected state had taken on an anthropomorphic quality. Light and shadow had put on faces.

This was in the winter of 1996. Kazem was in the house of his mentor, the late artist Hassan Sharif. He commented on the faces he saw in the damage and Sharif brought out his camera, encouraging him to capture what he was seeing. Kazem began taking photographs of the awning and its shade. The close-ups resembled portraits. The series was titled Faces to Face. It was exhibited at the Sharjah Art Museum in 1998.

Show caption: Mohammed Kazem is among the pioneering generation of Emirati…

“We were preparing for a portrait exhibition,” Kazem says. “I didn’t have any work ready. Then, as I was looking at the damage to the awning caused by the hail and rain, I realised it looked like portraits. I started getting close, taking pictures with Sharif’s camera.”

Faces to Face will now be presented at the first Frieze Abu Dhabi, in an exhibition that puts old and new works by Kazem alongside those by multidisciplinary artist and curator Alia Zaal.

Taking place within the In Dialogue section, the exhibition is being overseen by Dirwaza Curatorial Lab. It is being presented as a conversation between two generations of Emirati artists. In a way, the presentation expands on a pair of exhibitions that the artists showed in tandem earlier this year at Gallery Isabelle.

Show caption: A former protege of the late Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem h…

In one space, Zaal presented large-scale paintings that depicted ruffled mangrove leaves and shadowy palms with impressionistic vigour. The other showed smaller landscape pieces that Kazem produced in the 1990s. The scenes featured thick watercolour brushstrokes. A few also showed scratch marks on the paper, an approach the artist went on to develop later in his career. In most cases, the works were produced on site, with Kazem finding inspiration in the desert greenery in Hatta, or the plant life that erupted around overflowing sewers in Qusais.

Kazem regards the works as pivotal exercises in training his artist’s eye. “It was how I learnt to see what was in front of me,” Kazem told The National in July.

“I made a lot of mistakes, but it is how I learnt to convert the three-dimensional into the two-dimensional, also paying attention to perspective, reading light, shadows, measuring these things by eye.”

Like those works, Faces to Face come from a seminal moment in Kazem’s career, and points towards another intergenerational conversation – one in which Kazem was the junior figure.

Show caption: Mohammed Kazem’s work explores themes of memory, identity, g…

He was already beginning to veer away from more traditional art forms in the 1990s. Some of his most experimental works were created during this time, including his Tongue series, photography that shows the artist licking everyday objects, including door handles, key holes, coffee pots, glasses and gas canisters. The series was seen as a whimsical take on the dangers of consumerism.

It was also later in the 1990s that Kazem began his Photographs with Flags series, which showed him in Al Mamzar standing next to flagpoles, observing the distant apartment buildings. The urban skylines of Dubai and Sharjah were rapidly developing and Kazem, by simply standing next to a flagpole, watching, offered a historical snapshot, a vantage point to this development. Works from the series were used as the main visuals of the 2003 Sharjah Biennial. Kazem credits Sharif with propelling him across this experimental phase, for encouraging and testing the ideas that he had come up with.

“He was always tuned in,” Kazem says. “He always had his camera ready. He was always pushing me onwards.”

In fact, Kazem credits Sharif with much of his early artistic education. He initially met the artist, who died in 2016, in the early 1980s. Kazem was only 14 years old. Sharif had recently returned from London, where he studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art – which was then absorbed by Central Saint Martins.

Show caption: As his work is presented at the inaugural Frieze Abu Dhabi, …

A school trip had been planned to the Emirates Fine Art Society, which Sharif had co-founded. Kazem had arrived late to the villa near Sharjah’s Kuwait Roundabout and was told to come back the next day. When he returned, he found the building empty and diffidently made his way upstairs. Sharif was in one of the rooms, reading.

“I greeted him and he asked me what I wanted,” Kazem recalls. “I told him, ‘I am here to learn to draw’. He told me to go downstairs. He soon joined me. He set up the easel and then arranged a jug with a box and some pieces of cloth on the table as still life.”

Up until that point, Kazem had only drawn as part of his school exercises, including fish, animals and “random things”, he says. “I didn’t even know what an easel was.”

That first lesson effectively put him on an artist’s path. “He saw that I was learning quickly so he kept encouraging me from then on,” Kazem says. “He supplied me with materials, books about Cézanne, Picasso and painters I had no idea about. I was deeply affected by these books.”

Show caption: Mohammed Kazem outside his Dubai studio. Ben Cope for The Na…

Many of those books were not readily available in the country then, Kazem says. Sharif had brought with him a trove of art literature from London and his collection was instrumental in shaping Kazem’s understanding of art history, as well as many like him.

“He continued training me for two years and then said we had to build an archive,” Kazem says. “He was the first Emirati artist to build art archives. It was part of his education abroad. His camera was an important part of his practice as well. His performances needed photo documentation.”

Still in his teens, Kazem had already amassed a large portfolio of works, from still-life paintings to studies of Van Gogh and Cezanne. “He photographed the works and then developed the pictures himself,” Kazem says.

Show caption: Mohammed Kazem’s work has been exhibited internationally and…

It was also Sharif who helped Kazem hold his first solo exhibition in 1987, at the Emirates Fine Arts Society. Almost no one attended the exhibition, Kazem recalls with a chuckle. Still, Sharif told him not to be dissuaded.

“He was ahead of his time. The entire region was still concerned with paintings and sculptures. It never went beyond abstract art,” Kazem says. “He was doing performance art, installations. He was constantly writing, translating.”

Kazem fondly recalls his years of experimenting with Sharif. He stresses how influential and supportive the artist was in helping a new generation of artists develop in the UAE.

Kazem recalls how the official transformed his Ministry of Youth and Sports office into a studio for artists, giving them the freedom to experiment and think beyond painting and sculpture. Kazem depicted his workspace in Sharif’s office in several paintings, including the 1986 Studio, which was a highlight in the Khaleej Modern exhibition, held at NYU Abu Dhabi’s Art Gallery in 2022.

More than four decades have passed since that fateful day when Kazem walked into Sharif’s office and asked to be taught how to draw – and 30 years have passed since Kazem saw the eyes left behind by rainfall and hail.

His artistic practice has since taken on a number of directions. He was produced paintings, drawings and sculptural works. In his Scratches on Paper series, which he considers to be his most craft-intensive works, he inflicts precise notches in the canvas, which come together with terrain-like textures that react to light and shadow.

In Directions, perhaps his most expansive series, he uses GPS co-ordinates as an artistic medium. The series has taken on various forms, from photographs to a monumental installation at Expo City Dubai that arises in a twist of stainless steel numbers, with light emanating from within. He has tossed panels imprinted with co-ordinates into the open waters, mounted vinyls with co-ordinates on the windows of NYU Abu Dhabi and scribbled co-ordinates on stone blocks in a project in Bodh Gaya in India. Each iteration of Directions recalls a personal formative experience of being hurled overboard, of being lost at sea until a friend with a GPS device managed to retrace the boat’s trip.

With most of his practice, Kazem still carries with him Sharif’s spirit of experimentation. “He was my mentor for 30 years,” Kazem says. “And I was very lucky to have him as a mentor.”

Today, Kazem is an artist whose works are part of international collections, such as the Solomon R Guggenheim in New York and the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco and Paris, as well as regional collections, such as the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah and King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture in Dhahran. He has been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Venice Biennale in 2013 as part of the National Pavilion UAE.

Sharif has, in a way, accompanied him through much of his career. And even now, it is difficult for Kazem to speak about his artistic history without crediting Sharif.

“He wrote about us all, encouraged us all,” Kazem says of Sharif’s influence on the Emirati artists of his generation. “He would teach us and supervise us and organise exhibitions. He decided to do these things. It was a self-sacrifice.

“On his return to the UAE, he gave up fame but he started something. He is only now becoming known internationally. His works are only now in collections and exhibitions abroad. All that happened after his death.”

Sharif remains a luminary of contemporary art in the UAE, vital in shaping its avant-garde scene. Kazem has carried that torch forward, as have many others, including Abdullah Al Saadi, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim and Hussain Sharif, Hassan’s brother.

That generation of artists have been pivotal in laying the groundwork for the country’s artistic awareness, showing the necessity and advantages of nourishing a healthy cultural scene.

They played a large part in developing the network of commissions and government support that would create the conditions that would make it alluring for international institutions, such as the Louvre and the Guggenheim, to open here. At Frieze Abu Dhabi, visitors will see more that legacy, with a healthy breadth of contemporary art from the UAE on show. Within the In Dialogue section, meanwhile, they may see how Kazem’s practice is influencing a new generation of talents, carrying forward the fire of experimentation that the artist inherited.