Shifting Sands
Emirati artist Latifa Saeed’s solo show in Almaty was rooted in the dynamism of her home.
By Anna Seaman
When art historian, critic, and curator Valeria Ibraeva visited Latifa Saeed’s Dubai studio in January, she told the Emirati artist that she wanted to bring her work to Almaty for a solo exhibition that would showcase its breadth and diversity. In June, Saeed’s show A Black Silhouette opened in the city’s Almaty Gallery with a collection of nine distinct bodies of work from 2013 to today. It was her first solo and the first time an Emirati has exhibited a solo show in Kazakhstan. The exhibition paid credit to Saeed’s evolution as an artist and designer whose experimental approach covers fine art, graphic design, advertising, branding, and product design.
Urban development, migration, and transience are present throughout Saeed’s work, which is directly related to Dubai’s rapidly changing cityscape. Sand is a key part of her practice, with its fluid movement representative of Dubai itself. Among the works in the Almaty show,
Diminishing Landscapes (2020) is a series of hand-blown glass panels that incorporate sand from locations around Dubai. Fusing the sand into the glass makes the panels look painterly and is an abstract exploration of people’s relationship with the land.
The pieces ranged from artistic installations to design objects, like a pair of woolen chairs titled Nomads (2021) which reference the Bedouin communities who never used chairs in their simple tents.
Saeed traverses the gap between artist and designer, shunning definition and categorisation, preferring to concentrate on the message of her work which in this case, “deliberately confronts and subverts stereotypes, aiming to dismantle preconceived notions and foster a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the Arab world,” she says, explaining that the title too was a deliberate attempt to “challenge preconceived ideologies about the Arab woman”.
Later this year, Saeed will work at Abu Dhabi Art as part of its annual Beyond programme that showcases three emerging artists living in the UAE. It will bring the spotlight back to how she observes the idiosyncrasies of her home. She is working too on a piece of public art for Al Heera Beach in Sharjah—resin sculptures that resemble water drops placed in sand beds.
NOMADS (2021) Latifa Saeed explores the geographic and cultural fabric of Dubai, physically and metaphorically. Here she uses tent wool, a reference to Bedouin practices. Photo: courtesy of Latifa Saeed.
