There is a blessing in finding a particular kind of certainty that arrives early and never quite leaves. For Hashel Al Lamki, it came in the form of a nursery school drawing – a sheet handed out, coloured in, returned with a star and a simple verdict from a teacher: ‘You’re good at this.’ It is the sort of minor childhood affirmation many might forget. Al Lamki didn’t. In many ways, he built a life around it.
“It was just one of those moments,” he says. “I still remember it.”
What followed was not so much a decision as a continuation. Growing up in Al Ain, in public housing built for Emirati families, Al Lamki says art was not necessarily a prescribed path. At the time, there were no ecosystems to plug into, no institutions laying out a route from childhood aptitude to professional practice. Art classes at school were limited to once a week, and by grade six, they disappeared entirely, recounts Al Lamki. For most, that would have been the end of it.
For Al Lamki – whose art now sits in collections such as Barjeel Art Foundation and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi – it was just the beginning. “I went to my dad and said: ‘This is the situation. I’m not getting enough of this,” he recalls. What he asked for next was unusual: a private art tutor.
In a household where academic support was typically reserved for maths or science, it landed as something of a surprise. “They didn’t really get it,” he says with a smile. “My siblings needed help with physics. And here I was, asking for art classes at home.”
His parents found him a teacher anyway. The arrangement lasted until Al Lamki finished high school. Looking back, he recognises it for what it was – a quiet but decisive endorsement. “They were very supportive, especially my dad,” he says. “He came from a completely different upbringing, he was very corporate, but he was so supportive.”
The space came soon after. In the architecture of those government-built homes, kitchens would often be moved out of the main house to accommodate for the realities of family cooking. That left a surplus room inside the house. Al Lamki claimed it.
“I didn’t even know what I was doing,” he says. “I just turned it into my studio.” There is a kind of consistency to the way he describes his childhood. While others asked for toys or, later, cars, his own requests were narrowly focused. “I never asked for an Atari or a bicycle,” he says. “All I wanted was art supplies.” In the absence of dedicated stores in Al Ain at the time, he improvised by heading to bookshops with small creative sections and made occasional trips to Dubai, where better materials could be found.
If ever there were an alternative path to Al Lamki’s life, one where he isn’t an artist now considered one of the UAE’s most celebrated, it was never seriously tested. “I don’t know,” he says now, on the cusp of turning 40. “Sometimes I ask myself: ‘Did I ever try doing something else? Would I be good at something else?’” The question hangs for a moment before he answers it, but it is clear to me that he knows the answer. “This made sense. I felt comfortable. I studied it. I became good at it. And it still satisfies me for now.”
The route to formal education was not as straightforward. In 2007, the UAE offered few viable options for someone intent on pursuing art at a higher level. Scholarship applications did not come through the first time. A brief stint in the family business followed, less a detour than a holding pattern. “They told me: ‘You need to find something to do. You can’t just stay in this gap year.’”
Al Lamki enrolled at UAE University in Al Ain. It did not last long. Within the first term, a professor intervened. “He looked at me and said: ‘What are you doing? I can see where your passion is.’”
The intervention proved decisive – much like that early encouragement at nursery – leading to a connection with the cultural attache at the American Embassy and, eventually, to an exploratory programme linked to State University of New York in upstate New York. “I took everything,” he says of the academic options laid out in front of him. “Drawing, video, graphic design, colour theory.” The confirmation was immediate. “I was like: ‘Yes. This is it.”
As happy as he was, nearby New York City exerted a gravitational pull. Upstate, he realised, was not the place he had imagined. “It was a few hours away,” he says. “I knew I needed to be there.” The next step led him to Parsons School of Design, part of The New School, where the curriculum offered both structure and freedom. Core studio classes anchored the programme, but electives allowed for drift, which in Al Lamki’s case proved formative.
“At the time, it felt extremely random,” he says. “I took pattern-making, natural dyeing and lighting.” In retrospect, those choices read less like digressions and more like early indicators of a practice that would resist singular definition. Before heading to the US, his understanding of art had been narrow. “In my mind, art was painting,” he says. “That’s it.” Parsons dismantled that assumption. Performance, installation, material experimentation all entered the frame.
“You’re 18 or 19, you’re in New York, you’re porous, you’re a sponge,” he says. Museums, galleries, the constant openings and conversations: the city did what it has done for generations of young artists – it expanded the field of possibility. More importantly, it reframed the terms of engagement. Art was no longer a medium, but a way of thinking.
If that period provided the tools, the content would emerge later and closer to home. Al Lamki’s work today is often discussed through the lens of materiality and landscape, but its conceptual core is more personal, anchored in a lineage that while rooted in the Emirates, stretches beyond it.
“My great-grandparents were involved in the Spice Route,” he says. “They left Oman and lived in Zanzibar.” It is a history shaped by movement – across the Gulf, East Africa – and interrupted by rupture. The 1964 revolution in Zanzibar forced a dispersal; family members scattered across Egypt, London and the Gulf. His father arrived in the UAE in 1965, working for BP before the country’s unification.
“I was born decades later,” Al Lamki says, “but it’s part of my story.” He employs a term I had not come across before to describe part of what his practice explores: spice punk. At its simplest, it is a rejection of singular, western-centric narratives in favour of something more networked and fluid, with roots in South Asian literature. At its most ambitious, it is a way of reimagining cultural exchange itself. But it feels like less a manifesto than a working framework, an attempt to articulate these overlapping geographies and histories.
“Thanks for mentioning that,” he says when spice punk is brought up. “It’s something I’m really passionate about. These routes weren’t just about trade. They were about knowledge, connections, exchange. The connection was much deeper than we think today.” What interests Al Lamki is not nostalgia, but continuity, the idea that these histories remain active, if obscured, beneath the surface of contemporary identity.
The landscape of Al Ain provides a parallel narrative. Jebel Hafeet, the mountain that dominates the city’s horizon – visible from rooftops, the site of family gatherings, a fixed point in an otherwise shifting context – has been a constant presence in his life and his artistic practice. It was only later, through conversations with geologists and his own research, that he came to understand its formation: the collision of the African and Asian tectonic plates.
“It felt like a self-portrait,” he says of the mountain. Al Lamki’s work often operates in that space where personal history, geological time and cultural memory intersect. “Every time I dig deeper, there’s more,” he says. “It’s like adding a layer, but also shedding one.”
Materially, this manifests in a practice that is deliberately grounded. Al Lamki works with what is available – reclaimed textiles, natural pigments, found objects – not out of necessity, but as a philosophical position. “I’d rather work with what already exists,” Al Lamki says, “than trying to create something from scratch.” The process is intuitive rather than strictly conceptual. “In the studio, it’s not like this,” he says, gesturing towards the neatness of the space. “It’s more emotional. You follow something and it starts to make sense.”
In recent years, his work has taken him further east. Residencies, biennials, exhibitions in South Korea, China and Singapore have opened up new lines of inquiry. “It started with one show,” he says. “Then it led to another, and another.” Over time, the pattern became clearer. The cultural affinities between the Gulf and parts of Asia – coastal life, trading histories, shared sensibilities – offered an alternative axis, one that felt more aligned with his own interests than the established western circuit.
“I think I wanted to look in a different direction,” he says. “There are connections there that feel very familiar.” There is also, he admits, a more personal undercurrent. “Maybe it’s grief,” he says. The word is offered carefully, without elaboration, but it resonates with the broader trajectory of his work – a search for grounding, for context, for a way of situating oneself within a longer, less linear history. Something almost ancestral.
That search unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly changing UAE. Over the past two decades, the country’s cultural infrastructure has expanded apace, with platforms such as Art Dubai – where Al Lamki will exhibit a new work this month – playing a central role. Al Lamki’s own relationship with the fair mirrors that evolution.
“I first went as a visitor,” he says. “Then I was part of programmes, then showing with a gallery, then through non-profit work.” The progression is not unusual, but in his case it underscores a deeper point: the ecosystem has grown in tandem with the artists it supports.
“It’s more than just a fair,” he says. “It’s a community.” The emphasis is telling. While the commercial dimension remains, what he values most is the convergence. That annual moment when artists, curators, collectors and institutions occupy the same space, exchange ideas, take stock.
This year’s event, reshaped and rescheduled in response to broader uncertainties, has sharpened that sense of collective purpose. “It’s dynamic,” he says. “It’s very brave that they still kept the fair.” His own contribution is still being constructed when we speak. “It’s community-based,” he says of the piece, which emerges from artisan-led work resulting from a recent residency.
What matters, he suggests, is less the finished piece than the act of participation. “It’s about contribution. About belonging.” In a year framed by disruption, the decision to proceed carries symbolic weight. For Al Lamki, that symbolism aligns with a broader, more personal trajectory. The questions he is asking now – about origin, connection, the validity of inherited knowledge – are not easily resolved. Nor, it seems, is resolution the goal. “I think I’m getting closer,” he says. “But there’s always more.”
Photography by Aqib Anwar
Shot on location in Abu Dhabi
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