Off the wall: The artists who are the face of the Gulf street art scene
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Loading... - Ruben Espinoza
- 30 May 2022
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Spray can in her tattooed hand and baseball cap perched in her head, Dubai-born and raised artist Fathima Mohiuddin draws the glimpses from passers-by as splashes color onto a giant seven-story building on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.
From the UAE to Qatar, larger-than-life murals are increasingly being splashed on the side of buildings, car parks, and underpasses across the region – and it is women who are behind the street art.
A rising collective of artists across the GCC are aiming to change a cultural mindset about street art, from its association with graffiti and vandalism to expressive art that’s publicly available to the masses.
Mohiuddin is part of the street art scene in the UAE and is responsible for some of the hundred-foot high murals on multi-storey buildings across the country.
Mohiuddin – reputed for her bird-themed series, including one which depicts a falcon in preparation for flight, splashed across a seven-storey building in Abu Dhabi’s in Yas Island – said over the past years the UAE has welcomed more and more public art.
She believes this changing mindset is beginning to be echoed across the region.
“There’s definitely activity in countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi already,” said the artist. “The thing is that it starts, in theory, as subcultures, underground movement and then surfaces and becomes more publicly noticed and acknowledged.
“In the UAE it’s just taken on a strong commercial presence quite quickly. Perhaps because the UAE is very liberal.
“I can imagine women in other GCC countries might face more challenges in this respect. But there was just a street art festival in Qatar, there have been in Kuwait, there are definitely street artists paving the way in Saudi.”
Mohiuddin, an Indo-Canadian artist, said her foray into street art began after returning to the UAE from London a completing a masters course focused on art in public spaces.
Her first outdoor mural in the UAE was in 2009 for the Dubai Community Theatre and Arts Centre where Mohiuddin worked as the gallery and project manager at the time. She then, in 2011, founded the artist-run entity The Domino, a platform for street artists in Dubai.
“We started out doing small live pop-up gigs at events, working with brands like Tiger Beer, Red Bull and Adidas. “And I think that’s probably where it’s progressed the most, painting murals is something a fair few artists are able to do full time now. There is a commercial demand for it, there are corporate budgets and artists can sustain doing just that. In that way, the scale of things has changed a lot.”
'The growing street art scene allows artists to connect with a large number of eyeballs in, says Mohiuddin, “a massive way.”
“It is also taken more seriously now; we’re able to get respectable budgets and it has become a place artists from around the world want to come paint.
“It’s important to recognize the journey that got us here I think. It didn’t happen overnight. A lot of people worked really hard and handled a lot of challenges to pave the way for where the scene is now.”
Mohiuddin, who has about 10,000 followers on Instagram, began to get noticed for her work in the UAE and was approached to display her work globally.
She now has work depicted in 10 counties across the world with her signature style splashed across shipping containers, cars, walls and skate parks in some of the biggest global cities.
To date, she has street art in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bristol, London, Vienna, Waterford, New York, New Jersey, Toronto, Calgary, Mexico City, and Adelaide.
“I’m always proud of a public wall when I finish it because I know I’ve worked hard to get there, I know it’s still a big deal for women from this part of the world, women of colour, South Asian women.
“And the walls that go on to have a lifespan past a year are really exciting because they have this whole journey of their own after you leave them. You see photos pop up of people posing with them, you know people are having their own kind of experience and dialogue with them and that’s a pretty neat feeling that you left something somewhere that now has a life of its own.” Read More…
