Location, location, location
Acclaimed Emirati visual artist Mohammed Kazem talks us through some of his favorite work
When Mohammed Kazem was 14, he joined the Emirates Fine Art Society, which had been founded just four years earlier, in 1980. At the time, art was not part of the curriculum at Kazem’s school (nor, indeed, at many schools in the GCC). “Once a week, maybe, they would give us some paper and say, ‘OK. You have 40 minutes to draw.’ But draw what? There was no structure, no teaching of technique,” he says.
At the nascent Fine Art Society, the young Kazem was introduced to Hassan Sharif — one of the first generation of contemporary Emirati artists to study overseas. The two went on to work together for 30 years. “He was my mentor. Not just me, a lot of people,” Kazem says of Sharif. “He was a pioneer not just in the UAE or the GCC, but in the Arab world. He was doing conceptual work in the Seventies, when he was in the UK. Such work really didn’t exist, then, in the Arab world, because the focus was on conventional work, not contemporary. There was no conceptual work or performance art.”
Under Sharif ’s tutelage, Kazem learned quickly. At 17, he took part in his first exhibition, and over the next decade, he was invited to represent the UAE at a number of international art shows. He was already moving away from traditional painting (although he stresses how important it was for him to have learned conventional techniques) to experiment with other materials and artforms.
“The beauty of visual art is that you have the freedom to use anything,” he says. “If I need something conventional to support my concept I’ll go back to painting, because I have to.” Kazem’s conceptual art is an intriguing mix of profound ideas (loss, borders, social issues, nature, and human connection) and childlike irreverence.
“All of my work is really about what I am seeing and what I am thinking. It’s playful work,” he says. “It’s also serious. And ironic. But it’s not science, you know? It’s art. We’re not giving answers. We can provoke, and we can raise issues. But we don’t solve issues.”
‘Directions (Standing on Mingcui Lake)’
I’ve been using GPS coordinates in my practice since 1999. The reason I’m using GPS is because I had an accident on a fishing trip in the mid-Nineties. I was lost in the middle of the sea — you couldn’t see anything but the horizon all around. I had no idea where I was. So from 1999 until today, many of my works are called “Directions” — with subtitles — to know where I’m existing. They commissioned this work for the Yinchuan Biennale in 2016. I wanted to do
PORTFOLIO
something with a relationship to the area. I was living next to this lake for one month, so I recorded the coordinates while I was standing. Then I asked them to cut these numbers from natural material — because there are fish in the lake and I didn’t want to affect them — and I put all the coordinates into the water, so it was like I was standing on the water. It’s also about visual art — how you’re receiving images from media and from TV — we’re all receiving thousands of images in our daily lives, and I’m interested in capturing these elements and putting them into the context of art.
‘Kisses’
In 2010, I went to New York. I was crossing the road and saw a lot of gum on the street, and I came up with this concept: I bought some chalk and I connected the gum. That was “Kisses.” You don’t know who’s kissing who. Old man kissing a child. Man kissing a woman. Someone kissing someone who’s passed away. It’s kind of a poetic way of looking at something, and it was part of the environment that I was in. This series of “Kisses,” I made in South Korea. It’s a very simple idea, but very effective.
‘Nurses’
This is another example of work that was relevant to the place I was in. I met a lot of nurses in the States, and their uniforms were all made of different colorful fabrics, not like in the UAE. I started to count them daily — I’d sit at the place where they would cross the road and
I’d count: How many green? Yellow? Pink? So I was just focused on one thing. I chose to do that — not for long, just for a certain period. Then I ordered these fabrics online, and I created these minimalist pieces. And every time these works are shown, I ask the gallery to install them randomly, so they’re always shown differently. Why? Because it’s not a systematic work. I met these people randomly in the street, and I wanted to continue that random chance into the work. It looks like a very systematic work, but it’s not.
‘Directions (Yinchuan)’
I made this in China for the Yinchuan Biennale. You can see the symmetry — it’s kind of going back to convention. The first time I got this idea, I was in a room in Philadelphia, and the sunlight was only coming into it at sunset. So I had to wait until late afternoon, and that gave me an idea about how it has relation with symmetry:
How could you bring the light of the morning into the room? In the morning, I went behind the building and collected the coordinates while the sun hit my body. I printed those coordinates on vinyl, then when the light came into the room, it was passing through the coordinates of the morning, and bringing the light inside. Then it disappears. So this was a long (corridor), with panels on one side, and as the sun moved, it would light up coordinates on the opposite walls (as shown in the image). With these coordinates, and the sunlight, (it’s like I’m travelling).
‘Measuring’
This piece was for an exhibition called “White Cube…Literally.” The idea of the cube is this perfect measurement, so I wanted to break that with these random measurements. This work should be very sharp, very clean. It’s coated stainless steel, illuminated inside.