Mohammed Kazem

A pioneering figure in the United Arab Emirates’s contemporary art scene, Mohammed Kazem creates work that contemplates the meaning of place against the shifting developments sweeping his native country. Kazem’s work focuses especially on qualities of light and notions of time as characteristic elements of a space. Since 1990, he has been making scratched drawings on paper that archive the specific moment of their making. His “Directions” series, for which Kazem projects GPS coordinates in a space separate from the location they represent, considers these as abstract signifiers. “I am fascinated by collecting and documenting information about seemingly unimportant objects, traces of our present, within a particular environment,” he has said.