Mohammed Kazem

Abstract

Mohammed Kazem is a pioneering conceptual and multi-disciplinary artist from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) whose practice spans painting, photography, sculpture, paper works, photography, video installation, light installation, performance, and augmented reality. Informed by his parallel career in the military, Kazem’s disciplined conceptual vocabulary documents changing geographic realities and notions of identity. Mentored by the late avant-garde master Hassan Sharif, Kazem's work investigates sensory transformations, shifting topographies, and the socio-cultural and socio-economic contradictions of identity in the contemporary UAE. He also taught in Sharif’s Dubai Atelier and belonged to the UAE’s ‘Group of Five’ artists, which included Hassan Sharif, his brother Hussain Sharif, Abdullah Al Saadi, and Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim. This collective produced performance and land art, video installations, and gathered objects or ‘assemblages’ to highlight industrial production and the results of over-consumption and increased urbanisation.

Biography

As an artist working in the 1990s and early 2000s with Hassan Sharif at his Flying House studio, and as one of his art teachers in the Dubai Atelier, Mohamed Kazem was among the local artists who helped build an art public in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Kazem was born in Dubai in 1969. At 14, he left school to join the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces and served as a soldier for nearly 25 years. His interest in art coincided with his joining the military, and his military career provided crucial financial stability in an era when making a living as a conceptual artist in the region was not altogether viable. Kazem began working with the renowned Emirati artist Hassan Sharif and, with his encouragement, taught art for a number of years, while also embarking on several research-intensive projects, such as the Directions series. He has taken part in numerous international residencies and received his Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and conceptual practices in 2012 from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Early life and artistic education

Kazem grew up during a period marked by the radical geopolitical and spatial transformations that followed the formal creation of the United Arab Emirates in December of 1971. Unlike some peers from his generation who were granted state scholarships to study abroad, Kazem did not initially receive external funding. Instead, he developed his creative practice locally while serving in the UAE Armed Forces. During this period, he took classes at the Emirates Fine Arts Society (EFAS), where he attended experimental art courses taught by the artist Hassan Sharif. Sharif introduced Kazem to theoretical systems and radical approaches that constituted departures from both traditional Islamic and Western aesthetic paradigms. Through the intensive education he underwent at EFAS and Sharif's atelier, his time teaching in the Dubai Atelier and later through his involvement with the Flying House initiative of Hassan’s brother Abdulraheem Sharif, Kazem developed a curious and highly personalised conceptual vocabulary centred around performance, documentation and the environment.

Artistic themes and practices

Kazem’s artistic practice explores personal identity and belonging, not simply through provocation, as Hassan Sharif had done, but through a clear, pared-back visual language that highlights the granular details of contemporary society in the UAE with unambiguous directness. Kazem was initially inspired by Sharif’s direct method of practice and the latter’s fondness for the techniques of Fluxus artists. Over time, Kazem developed his own aesthetic and conceptual vocabulary, building a thoughtful practice that explores environmental themes and questions contemporary society and the cost of what has been destroyed for it to grow. Kazem highlights aspects of his environment that surprise him or don’t make sense, using photography, film, performance, paint, and print. By directing attention to people and situations, he also reveals natural elements of the built environment through precise structural interventions.

Some of his works include:

Tongue series (1994) Monochrome gelatin silver prints.

In the Tongue series, Kazem is portrayed fitting his tongue into keyholes, down tubes, and other hard-to-reach or hidden spaces. The effect is both sensual and uncomfortable, as the figure contorts himself to fit his tongue into spaces not meant for intimate human touch. The resulting images evoke the performative actions of the Fluxus movement, which often used performance and the body to consider the environment and humanity’s role within it.

Photographs with Flags (1997–2003)

This early series of 24 colour prints depicts a figure standing next to a flag in an empty lot. The figure is anonymous, since they have been photographed from behind and their clothing consists of dark trousers and a simple white shirt. The emphasis is on the flag itself, blowing in the wind, the vast empty plot around them and the cityscape in the background. In these photographs, Kazem comments on accelerated urban development and the environmental transformation of the UAE, though the flag is deliberately unidentifiable. This dichotomy between identity and non-identity, place and non-place aids Photographs with Flags’ consideration of identity, culture and urban development. Photographs with Flags also references the marker flags used by surveyors and military units to demarcate construction zones, acting as an early witness to a rapidly changing environment. After Photographs with Flags, Kazem explored digital prints mounted in lightboxes with Windows (2003–2004), a work that provides additional documentation of the developments and changes going on in his country and the sociological consequences of its emergent modernity. Both Photographs with Flags and theWindows series (which was exhibited at the 7th Sharjah Biennial in 2005) directly address Dubai’s rapid architectural transformation. This eye for urban transformation stems directly from Kazem’s years traversing the shifting UAE borders as a soldier, watching empty desert landscapes turn into mega-cities almost overnight.

The Neighbours Series (2006/2018).

This series is made up of several parts, including a series of photographs series taken by Kazem from his studio window in Al Quoz, a semi-industrial district of Dubai. These early photographs, initially exhibited in 2006, show the clothes of labourers and service industry workers hung out to dry, air-conditioning units sticking out of windows, and dense clusters of wiring and electrical leads. This series began Kazem’s focus on the expatriate workers who staff Dubai’s service and construction industries. Paintings belonging to the Neighbours series were included in his 2018 solo exhibition, Prime Activity, at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, which saw him reflecting on social barriers. It included a series of delicate and colourful watercolour/acrylic studies on paper that featured these same domestic and industrial workers going about their lives—queuing at a bus stop or walking the Dubai streets in the heat of the day. Kazem’s focus ranged from the people (and their traces) that habituated his studio’s neighbourhood, to the spaces or territories that they create or occupy; included in the series are abstract works painted using colourful industrial house paint on MDF panels of the sort commonly used in budget building projects. These colourful shapes were intended to reflect the districts, properties, lives and spaces occupied and built for the different inhabitants of Dubai.

Seeing the Invisible (2019-2021)

During the time of the global pandemic, Kazem took part in an international augmented reality (AR) project entitled Seeing the Invisible. Internationally acclaimed artists, Kazem among them, created works that would appear on peoples’ smart phones in specific botanical gardens around the world.

The Directions series

Born out of a personal experience of physical disorientation at sea, one of Kazem’s first actions in theDirections series was to drop pieces of wood into the ocean fitted with GPS trackers. Kazem chose to show Directions (Zero), a visual manifestation of the Directions series entitled that focused on coordinates and identity. He began the series in 2010, presenting it at the UAE pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. The subsequent work Kazem made using this GPS data not only explored the utilitarian tools of military mapping and cartography but also offered a commentary on belonging, vulnerability and isolation—globally and as an Emirati national—in a country where expatriates largely outnumber the local population.

The thematic focus on isolation and global connectivity found renewed significance during the COVID pandemic of 2020 to 2022. During this time, Kazem deepened his engagement with the theme of sensory solitude. For the Directions (Zero) project, the artist imagined and subsequently imaged a giant circle or zero, a number which functions as an origin point and as a void. As well as suggesting links to navigational computation, the equator and meridian lines, the numeral ‘O’ is also an invention of Arabic mathematics.

Sound of Objects and Weight of Sound (2014)

While sound features in Kazem’s work, it is often physically soundless. While he challenges audiences’ perceptions and encourages them to notice what has been overlooked in terms of spaces (using his tongue and people who are overlooked in society, particularly in the case of the domestic workers and labourers in the Neighbours series), Kazem encourages a lot of inner dialogue. This is the case with two conceptual works that explore intangible phenomena such as sound and radio frequencies. Sound of Objects consists of a thick paper or card with a scratched surface. The rugged and uneven torn surface evokes anxiety or slow destruction over time. Weight of Sound is a glass vial containing the paper ‘scratches’, which are likened to saved evidence of a moment in time, something that cannot be undone. This work is a shift away from direct photographic actions such as those depicted in the Tongue series, a digression into a silent, visual exploration of what remains after an action.

Sound as a conceptual practice and as a textured structure is ever present in Kazem’s work. Although it is often soundless or translated into visual form, the work of Kazem, himself a trained musician, is shaped by music, meter and rhythm. This is particularly true of conceptual works such as Sound of Objects and Weight of Sound.

General Interpretation

When Kazem began his artistic practice, initial reactions to his work within the local art community was mixed. This was at a time when art and art audiences were becoming more sophisticated, however this produced a resistance within Kazem, motivating him to redouble his efforts to produce demanding visual systems, to renew his experimentation with media and concepts, and to continue to question how things are seen and experienced in a physical, emotional and sensory way.

Visually, Kazem’s often colourful, structural and tactile interventions invite viewers into an intimate phenomenological relationship. He encourages a thoughtful state of observation where viewers are encouraged to examine their changing surroundings and also themselves.

Through his work across an ever-growing range of media, Kazem’s work captures the environmental, political, urban and conceptual changes and narrative of daily life. It could be argued that from his early Tongue series to the massive virtual circle or hole made by augmented reality, Kazem’s practice demonstrates what it is to be human. He expresses the feelings of disorientation, loneliness and vulnerability inherent in modernity, as urban and technological developments continue to encroach upon the natural world. This has made him one of the foundational figures of contemporary art in the UAE and a fundamental voice in the development of contemporary in the Arabian Gulf region.

Bibliography

Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation. Portrait of a Nation: Contemporary Art from the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi, 2016.

Allison, Maya (ed.). But We Cannot See Them: Tracing a UAE Art Community 1988–2008. Abu Dhabi: New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, 2017.

De Marchi, Cristiana. "Mohammed Kazem: The Perspective Approach." Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East 13 (2013): 92–97

Derderian, E. (2018). Arts Education: Resources and Options for the UAE and Ras Al Khaimah. Al Qasimi Foundation, 1-12.

e-flux. “Mohammed Kazem.” Accessed 13 March 2017.

Fadda, Reem (ed.). Mohammed Kazem: Walking on Water. Exhibition catalogue. Venice: United Arab Emirates Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2013.

Fadda, Reem, Paula Kolczynska, Hassan Sharif, Sultan Al Qassemi, and Adel Khozam. Mohammed Kazem. Bologna: Damiani, 2014.

Kazan Makhlouf, Sophie. The Development of An Art History in the UAE: An Art Not Made To Be Understood. Anthem Press, 2024.

Reifenscheid, Prof. Dr. Beate. Mohammed Kazem: Directions. Exhibition catalogue. Koblenz: Ludwig Museum, 2023.

van der Koelen, Dr. Dorothea. Mohammed Kazem: Collecting light. Exhibition catalogue. Mainz: Chorus, 2019.