Certain images recur across cultures and centuries, even when the people making them have never met.
One of those images is at the centre of Emirati artist Eman Al Hashemi’s new exhibition.
The Horizon We Inherit, which opened at Iris Projects in MiZa, Abu Dhabi, on Saturday, brings together ceramics, printmaking and mixed media to examine urban life, memory and the symbols that persist across generations.
“The main influence that started all of this project was the sun symbol that I saw in Fujairah,” Al Hashemi says. “But then I started looking at suns in other cultures.”
During a trip to Kyrgyzstan this summer, she noticed a solar symbol similar to those she had already been developing. “I even took a picture of it and everyone thought that I had made it there,” she says.
The similarity led her to think about why visual languages echo across places as distant as the Gulf, Central Asia, Africa and South America.
“It is interesting to see how archaeology is connected everywhere and how these drawings are connected,” she says. “I think many of the old drawings or old writings are connected in some way, and this is a question that I keep asking: what is this connection? Maybe it is just us being human.”
That tension between ancient symbols and contemporary life runs through the exhibition.
Recurring motifs include the sun, street lights, buildings and roundabouts, which appear in sculptural forms that feel familiar without being immediately identifiable. The exhibition also considers how infrastructure, movement and redevelopment shape memory, and what remains when a place changes or disappears.
Al Hashemi describes herself as “a collector of stories”.
“A lot of my work takes time to cook,” she says. “I collect different stories, different things that happen and different things in my surroundings to create a body of work.”
Her previous work has focused on spoons and mass production, as well as vessels made with other people as a way of exploring connection.
“Every time, I feel like I focus on a different story, but they all have the same theme of modern-day living, or how we live our lives,” she says.
The vessel returns in The Horizon We Inherit, this time alongside the sun and the elements of the built environment.
“The building is a vessel, so it’s a combination of a street light, sun, a vessel,” Al Hashemi says. “I think vessels generally hold a lot of energy, whether it’s a holder of maybe sunlight or a holder of communication.”
That ability to contain and preserve something is central to the work. “They kind of hold the thing that we want to convey or keep long term.”
The exhibition also marks a shift in her use of colour. Al Hashemi says brighter shades had previously appeared mostly in smaller drawings that she rarely showed, while much of her other work was more muted. The Iris Projects team encouraged her to carry some of that colour into the new body of work.
“It’s been a while since I was very excited about what I was making,” she says. “It actually felt like playing somehow.”
She calls the move towards brighter colour “a new investigation” and adds: “I’m not sure where it’s going to go, but I think it’s an exciting investigation.”
Seeing the works together has also changed the way she reads them. “I think each medium brings something new to the work, and maybe colour does that as well,” she says.
Born in Dubai in 1993 and based between Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, Al Hashemi works across ceramics, printmaking, painting and installation. She earned her BA in Fine Arts from the University of Sharjah and an MFA in Ceramics from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in the US. She now teaches full-time at the University of Sharjah.
Her interest in UAE art history deepened while studying abroad. Al Hashemi says she knew relatively little about many local artists while completing her bachelor’s degree, but later began looking more closely at figures such as Hassan Sharif, whom she describes as “a pioneer artist here” who “paved the way for everyone”.
She sees a connection between his use of found and mass-produced objects and her earlier work questioning what happens to the value of things when everything is mass-produced.
Al Hashemi hopes visitors leave with questions rather than fixed answers.
“I would hope that it opens up conversations,” she says. “The work that gets talked about, or opens up topics, is what’s important. I would like people to connect to it, to ask some questions. I think even some confusion is good.”
The Horizon We Inherit runs until November 26 at Iris Projects, MiZa, Abu Dhabi
