As a teenager in the UAE of the 1990s, Nadia Kaabi-Linke painted watercolours of the port of Sharjah and the skating rink of Dubai’s Hyatt Regency hotel.
Three decades on, now an acclaimed artist, she is preparing an event at her studio in Berlin where her guests – one is travelling especially from the UAE – will reflect on the art scene of that time.
She is speaking to The National on the day that President Sheikh Mohamed held talks in Berlin on a state visit, and Kaabi-Linke is full of “beautiful memories” as she reflects on her own journey from the UAE to Germany.
“I became an artist thanks to the UAE,” she said. Born in Tunisia in 1978, she first dreamt of being a dancer. But in the “very intimate” Dubai of the 1990s, as she remembers it, there was no dance school to match her ambition.
Art was another story. What began with lessons from her Ukrainian mother soon became watercolours painted for her school classroom and visits to the Sharjah Art Museum, where local artists were offered residencies.
“My career started from Sharjah,” Kaabi-Linke said. “When I left I went to Tunisia and to France, but my career really kicked off in the Emirates.”
Different cultures
Keeping count, that’s the UAE, Tunisia, Ukraine, France and Germany, and Kaabi-Linke’s work has been shaped by the different countries and cultures in which she has roots.
The event she is hosting at her studio, where her artworks liven up an old East German housing block, is part of that devotion to connecting cultures. She calls the event a lamma, meaning a casual gathering in Arabic. Friday’s is the third in a series that began after war erupted in the Middle East on October 7, 2023.
The war gave her a sense that “everybody is afraid to say something", she said, especially in Germany where a pro-Israel atmosphere prevailed. Having just moved into the Berlin studio after another tenancy fortuitously fell through, she felt it was important “to offer my space for safe, critical conversation”.
Kaabi-Linke’s connection to the UAE did not end when she left Dubai. It hardly could have done: her father stayed behind, having established himself as a director in Emirati football.
In 2009, an exhibition at the Sharjah Biennial was “how I became known”, she recalled. Her breakthrough was an artwork called Under Standing Over Views, a collection of fragments that form the shape of the seven Emirates. (The UAE’s outline becomes visible when you stand beneath it – hence the play on words Under Standing).
“It was a work where I wanted to speak about the openness of the UAE,” she said. “I don't know any other country where you have so much immigration, and everybody literally feels home. There is a place for everyone.”
The UAE-inspired artwork has been displayed several times in Berlin. Kaabi-Linke also has a permanent sculpture at the Dubai Expo site. Going to the UAE “always feels like coming back also home because childhood is always your home", she said.
This week she has just returned from Uzbekistan, where she exhibited a work called Flying Carpets that has been acquired by the Guggenheim collection. The work was inspired by a crackdown on illegal migration in Italy.
Kaabi-Linke, however, does not like to tell her audience what to make of her work. “Once the work is there, I feel it doesn't belong to me,” she said. “I want to hear the viewers in different countries with their own backgrounds, to inform me and to teach me about my work.
“Because my life is so deeply embedded in immigration and cross-culturality, I can so naturally be in a place and feel I'm part of the people and their culture.”
Immigration politics
Immigration is a major talking point in Berlin right now. One guest at Kaabi-Linke’s studio get-togethers was Manaf Halbouni, a Syrian-German artist who works on similar themes of migration and politics. He is one of about a million people in Germany of Syrian descent.
But the mood has shifted since the “refugees welcome” days of 2015. Berlin was this week digesting an anti-Islam party’s rampant victory in a state election, possibly giving the German far right its first real taste of power since 1945. “People see the Germans as fascists again,” Kaabi-Linke fears.
Nonetheless, she is determined to keep spreading her brand of dialogue in Germany, the place her watercolours in Sharjah brought her to and which she now calls home with her husband Timo.
She compared her relationship with Berlin to an engagement that one should not call off at the first sign of difficulty.
“This is my city. I chose her. I also took the German citizenship,” she said. “I'm going to stand and resist the way I can.”
