Mohammed Kazem United Arab Emirates, b. 1969

Source: Gallery Isabelle

Mohammed Kazem (born 1969, Dubai) lives and works in Dubai. He has developed an artistic practice that encompasses video, photography and performance to find new ways of apprehending his environment and experiences. The foundations of his work are informed by his training as a musician, and Kazem is deeply engaged with developing processes that can render transient phenomena, such as sound and light, in tangible terms. Kazem was a member of the Emirates Fine Arts Society early in his career and is acknowledged as one of the 'Five', an informal group of Emirati artists – including Hassan Sharif, Abdullah Al Saadi, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim and Hussain Sharif – at the vanguard of conceptual and interdisciplinary art practice.

In his series Even the Shade Does not Belong to Them, based on photographs he took in the street, portray labourers working on building sites. It seems as if we are looking at the protagonists, painted in acrylic and dark ink, through a murky glass. The effect conveys how the labourers, though always there, often go unnoticed. “People look right through them” notes the artist.