Hind Mezaina

A blank billboard struck inspiration for Hind Mezaina during the pensive lull of early pandemic lockdowns in Dubai. As she contemplated her place in this vast, ever-changing city of spectacle, heritage, growth, and stories, she developed a unique lens with which to view this blank canvas presented to her.

“It suddenly felt so quiet,” she remarked. This loss of visual clutter, she found, allowed her to instead notice an entirely different visual language of Dubai.  On her various solitary walks or drives within the city, she noticed motifs and patterns across construction sites, abandoned areas, and residential and community spaces to incorporate into her work. 

“One of the most interesting things I discovered was the appreciation of walking in Dubai. I’ve found that I enjoy walking to notice new things or new sides of the city. Walking helps me see markings of human presence across the city, whether it's in discarded items, footprints, or objects,” she recalled.

Based around the Deira side of the creek, Mezaina grew up with an urgent need to document her surroundings. In fact, much of her work as an artist, photographer, and curator seeks to unpack her relationship to Dubai and create a personal record of the city as it changes and grows right before her eyes. And as she herself grows up with the city, grappling with the visual landmarks of the city’s past are perhaps also a way of preserving memory and evidence of her own past. 

At a recent solo exhibition at Tashkeel Dubai, Mezaina channeled many of these thoughts into her exhibition titled “Wonderland.” The title alludes to both the wide-eyed curiosity and awe with which she was seeing and processing Dubai in the pandemic lockdown days, and also an extension of her larger work in piecing together Dubai’s collective narrative. 

In addition to taking pride in being from the Deira side of the creek—one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods—she feels her slice of Dubai is uniquely grounded and calm. Much like the blank billboard, it allows space for playful creativity and possibilities. A typical photo walk in this area might render shots of cranes and projects in mid-development, the striking blues of the creek, and contrasts of sunlight and shade

Besides using the camera lens to process and marvel at the city and its people, she finds that Dubai’s cinema scene is a crucial space to use art as an entry point into larger conversations on topical issues. “When I curate film screenings, I like to engage in conversation wit I’m always curious about how people respond, what they bring in, and how our ideas mix. Dubai has so many nationalities and so many age groups, and we should hear from each other,” she says.

Her love of the city is matched only by her conviction in finding its hidden historical gems and the stories of the people around her. 

Her love of the city is matched only by her conviction in finding its hidden historical gems and the stories of the people around her. Within her studio are endless piles of books on Dubai’s history—a collection of title covers from a fictional novel published in the ‘70s, theories of city formation, a guide to the UAE’s architecture, archive magazines from Dubai’s ‘90s for research purposes, and a messy overlap of photo prints on a cork board.