By Layla Al Mazrouei ~
Against the dusty light of evening over the Abu Dhabi horizon, a revolution is quietly unfolding—not of glass and metal but of story, of brush and pigment, of line. Throughout the United Arab Emirates, there is flooding into being a new generation of Emirati artists rewriting cultural narratives and re-fashioning presumptions about identity in the Arab world. These are not reinforcing but remaking, for an arising audience—a root-deep one but cosmopolitan-inflected one.
No longer gaze in awe at monumentality of build and scale of modernity unto itself, the UAE ever more also is being contemplated as a hub of forthcoming art-production. On art-galleries’ canvases and cinema screens, in print-shops and open-mics, there is a concentrated reservoir of Emirati voices that yearn for words in which to articulate what it is to belong—really, to place, to heritage, and to re-constitutive re-making of cultural landscape.
Sheikha Al Qassemi is among them, Abu Dhabi artist whose concept photographs of color in utopian context are reminiscent recollections of dune color, blackness of Gulf waters and bitter pain of remembrance. “I paint my canvas like a diary,” she explains, to describe how her canvases speak for themselves and of shared memory. Her work is drawn from pre-existing symbolism—palm or henna print—mixed with loose abstraction, an iconography that moves backwards and forwards. Al Qassemi embarks on a highly personal but brutally contemporary quest for identity and belonging in her painting.
Games of high stakes are played instead by avant-garde film maker Ali F. Mostafa as he weaves the UAE’s thick social fabric into a rich tapestry. His Sundance Grand Jury Prize-shortlisted City of Life weaves together Emirati, expat, and migrant worker stories to capture the cosmopolitan taste of Dubai. “Film can humanize,” Mostafa told an interviewer, “bridge divides and create empathy.” His films borrow from the discord and agreements of a society attempting to achieve a balance between tradition and manically fast-forwarding urbanism, spinning yarns that are hyperlocal but somehow global.
Even poetry is having its renaissance. Oral and Nabati poetry have been the cornerstones of Emirati culture for centuries. Poets like Najwa Al Qasimi are now bringing this art form back to life. Her poems that she recites at all types of poetry recitals and literary salons are on love, exile, and rebirth. She puts new material into the old vehicle and thereby updates poetry and brings it to the new era. Our tongue carries the memory of past, she believes, “but also ask what is to be.”
Initiatives like the Emirati Talent Program elevate to dizzying heights such nascent voices. With schools vying to develop talent in-house, the program provides residencies, mentorship, and global experience to fresh musicians. Such initiatives are incubators, where cross-disciplinary interfaces and cross-border transfers of know-how become possible. They are also carving out room for hitherto marginalized voices—i.e., women and young people—and re-claiming culture on newer and newer terms.
Behind it there is no preservationist or evolutionist undertaking. It is work of evolution. They’re producing new Emirati cultural space that’s faced with complication and honoring their heritage. In so stereotypically monolithic a city, they bring depth, richness, and humaneness.
And to page, canvas, stage, screen, what they’re doing is less presenting offering art—giving vision. Vision of unfrillied, proud, Emirati face-forward identity. And a reminder that culture is not something to lock behind a museum door, but to breathe and breathe—one that finds strength in commonness.
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