Design: the fine print behind Dubai’s new font

The recent introduction of the Dubai font, which made world headlines, has been celebrated and questioned. Nick Leech considers the fine print behind the typeface.

At the end of April 2017, Dubai added yet another acquisition to its steadily growing list of attributes.

No longer just a city, an emirate, a tourist destination or even home to the world’s tallest building and busiest airport, the city now also has its own official typeface, the Dubai font.

The product of a 2-year-long partnership between the government of Dubai, the computer giant Microsoft and Monotype, the owner of some of the most popular and influential typefaces ever created – Times New Roman, Arial and Gill Sans – the font was commissioned in 2015 by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai and chairman of Dubai’s Executive Council.

The benefits of the partnership that produced the font became clear at its unveiling at in a launch event that was held at the Dubai Opera. 

Not only was the font free to download from its own website – it has all the social media accoutrements that any self-respecting digital wannabe could want including its own hashtag, #Expressyou – but it would also be distributed as a default Arabic and Latin font through Microsoft Office 365.

Added to the entities involved in the deal the scale of the launch – at a stroke it was made available to Office 365’s 100 million regular users in 180 countries world-wide – caught the imagination of the media and suddenly the quotidian became the stuff of headlines and the usually obscure world of type design became international news. 

Such attention for the issue of how and what we write and read may have set typographer’s pulses racing, but there was confusion amongst the media about just how big a deal the font was, a situation exacerbated by some of the statements that accompanied its release.

“Self-expression is an art form. Through it you share who you are, what you think of and how you feel to the world. To do so you need a medium capable of capturing the nuances of everything you have to say,” waxes the font’s website.

“The Dubai font does exactly that. It is a new global medium for self-expression. By celebrating the past and embracing the future, transcending all barriers, the Dubai font is the voice of our brave new world.”

Here was yet another example, it seemed, of a city obsessed with record-breaking reaching for yet another first with typical headline-grabbing chutzpah.

Could a font really be that important or was this yet another announcement from the Neverland that brought us asteroid-suspended skyscrapers and hyperloops designed to propel passengers across the emirates at credulity-stretching speeds?

In its race to publish the story, The Guardian failed to get to the truth of the font’s finer print.

“This article was amended on 1 May 2017,” the London-based newspaper admitted. “An earlier version included an incorrect claim that the font was the first to be developed for a city and carry its name.” 

If Dubai wasn’t the first city or even country to have a font named after it, what was going on? Was this just a headline-grabbing marketing stunt or yet another tilt at city branding designed to position Dubai as a leader in the technology sphere?

While the Dubai font represents the first typographic collaboration between the corporation and a government and is the first Microsoft typeface to be created for, and named after, a city, there is already a long list of countries and cities that have developed their own bespoke scripts.

In 2014 Sweden adopted Sweden Sans for all of its government, ministry and corporate communications while in 2010 the Office of the Brand Abu Dhabi commissioned its own Latin and Arabic fonts, which accompany the emirate’s logo on newer Abu Dhabi-registered vehicle license plates as well as in the branding for the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority.

Aesthetically, however, the approach to font design adopted by the designers of the Abu Dhabi and Dubai fonts could not be more different.

Whereas the Latin font developed for the office of the Brand Abu Dhabi attempts to ape the horizontality and shallow curves of traditional Arabic calligraphy, the Arabic and Latin scripts designed for the Dubai font by Nadine Chahine and her team at Monotype aim for parity in a situation where there is, she insists, rather more than mere aesthetics at stake.

“When I was studying graphic design in the 1990s in Beirut, the number of available Arabic typefaces was very limited and the quality was very poor,” Monotype’s UK type director and legibility expert explains.

“Lebanon is like the UAE. There are lots of bilingual publications and projects and every time we put the Arabic and the English together, the English looked very nice and the Arabic looked poor and this is not OK,” she insists, linking typographic harmony with wider issues, not just of branding and business, but of politics and Arabic identity.

“That would be a reflection on who we are and that’s not where we want to be, [but] we need to be able to speak at the same level and to have harmony and coexistence at the same level. We are not less.”

To ensure that there no concessions made in the design of the font’s Arabic script Chahine, who has designed Arabic versions of well-known Latin scripts such as Neue Helvetica, Univers and Palatino, designed the Dubai font’s Arabic version first.

“Usually the Latin is designed first but that gives you less freedom with what you can do with the Arabic, which then has to follow the Latin and so you inherit design decisions that you would not have wanted to face,” Chahine explains, aiming instead for a situation where both the Arabic and Latin typefaces achieve a harmony without aesthetic or cultural concessions.

“It’s a reflection of who we are, what we want to be and of Dubai. The foreigners here don’t have to wear local dress and the locals don’t have to wear Western dress, they all are comfortable in their own identities and they coexist,” she says, reflecting on the Dubai Executive Council’s original brief.

“It said in the brief that the Latin and Arabic should be designed together, harmoniously,” Chahine remembers. “But it was very important that we respect the heritage of each while meeting on middle ground and respecting the traditions of where we come from.”

The other key factors that determined the font’s design were that, as well as being distributed through Microsoft Office, it should be available and legible to anyone using Microsoft software – regardless of the device – and that it should also be effective regardless of its context.

“Normally when you have a brand who comes to you they usually have a specific usage in mind. They might it want it for signage or for tourist authority work or for newspaper headlines or TV and that guides your design decisions,” explains the designer, whose other fonts are already in use by local clients such as Dubai Airport, Emirates National Bank of Dubai and Emaar.

“But the fact that the Dubai font was going to ship through Microsoft Office and be for use by everyone mean that the font needed to be extremely versatile to allow different kinds of usages and that made it an extremely difficult task,” she says.

Becoming part of the Microsoft suite also meant that the new font had to be readily distinguishable from all of the other standard fonts currently available through Office, both Latin and Arabic.

“Part of the brief, design-wise, was that the type face had to very legible and easy to read and that’s why you see the simplicity of form in it, it’s not too complicated,” Chahine admits. “But it also needed to carry the voice and the vision of Dubai.”

Within days of its launch, Dubai Courts announced that it had adopted the typeface for all of its official communications as did the Dubai-based conference and events company Index Holding, becoming the first Emirati private company to use the font for its electronic communications in the process.

To understand the font’s origins, it is necessary to look back to 2015, the UAE’s self-declared Year of Innovation, explains Engineer Ahmad Al Mahri, assistant secretary general for the Executive Council and general secretariat affairs sector of Dubai.

“We were asked by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan to come up with ideas that would help to position Dubai at the forefront of innovation and a font also fitted well with the UAE’s aim of promoting Arabic and literacy, which were promoted during the UAE’s Year of Reading in 2016.”

Viewed from this perspective, the Dubai font can be understood not just as a clever publicity stunt or a sophisticated piece of place-branding but as part of an ongoing and far wider set of initiatives, which began in earnest with the launch of the UAE’s National Strategy for Innovation but also include the social media campaign, #MyDubai, both of which were launched in 2014.

Designed to help broaden public perceptions of the city while keeping it firmly in the spotlight such initiatives, which also include the forthcoming Dubai Institute of Design Innovation, a joint venture with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and New York’s Parson School of Design, are a part of the emirates’ strategic diversification effort, not just beyond oil but beyond tourism and shopping as well.

Having said that, the Dubai font also represents marketing and brand-building at its most sophisticated.

“When I heard about it I immediately wished I had thought of it,” admits Mark Rollinson, Chairman of the Abu Dhabi-based creative consultancy All About Brands.

“The idea of designing a font that has the potential to become ubiquitous in the field of digital communication and is also one of Microsoft’s default fonts is incredibly smart because it will constantly put Dubai at the front of people’s minds even if they only scroll past the font and never use it.”

The agency behind Brand Abu Dhabi and the revamped crests for Manchester City football club and the government of Abu Dhabi, All About Brands have also developed corporate identities for Abu Dhabi Airports and the UAE Space Agency, Masdar and the Yas Marina Circuit.

“On the face of it creating a font seems like a fairly small initiative but when you start seeing the numbers – 100 million people in 180 countries – it’s amazing,” he says.

“Can you imagine what you’d have to pay for an advertising campaign with that reach? I think it’s a really clever piece of marketing and whatever they had to pay for it, I think they’ll find it’s value for money.”

To put matters in perspective, Superbowl 2017 attracted 113.7 million-strong audience while the 2017 Oscar Ceremony could muster only 32.9 million viewers. 

As well as its potential ubiquity however, Rollinson also believes that the initiative has the marketing legs to move beyond the world of computing and type.

“They can start calling for poetry, writing and even design competitions where the entries have to use the font and hashtag,” the branding expert enthuses. 

“The choices to exploit the font when more than 100 million people have got it just go on and on.”

Nadine Chahine is more circumspect and refuses to be drawn on the likely fate of her new font.

“When we designed the typeface it was with the intention that it would have many usages, but only time will tell whether it has a resonance with people and whether they will want to use it,” the designer insists.

One of the things that might determine how the font is eventually embraced and adopted is the fine print of the detailed and labyrinthine terms and conditions that accompany its use.

In a bid to avoid any potential misuse these insist that the Dubai font cannot be used “in any manner that goes against the public morals of the United Arab Emirates or which is offensive or an affront to the local culture and/or values of the United Arab Emirates” and that users of the font also agree to “irrevocably submit to the jurisdiction of the Courts of the Emirate of Dubai”, clauses that sit uneasily with a project dedicated to allowing “all type users to express themselves freely to the world”.

One thing, however, is certain. The history of printing and typography is full of examples of tools and technology that have had unintended consequences their inventors could never have imagined.

Historians have credited the invention of the printing press and movable type with everything from the proliferation of books, literacy and lenses in Renaissance Europe to the creation an intellectual environment where cities, economies and intellectual revolutions could thrive.

The eventual impact of the Dubai font will be just as difficult to foresee and is likely to be just as tangential, but it would appear that for the unsuspecting, this is a free font whose use has the potential to come at a very high price.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National

Art: Lalla Essaydi’s Still in Progress at Leila Heller, Dubai

Nick Leech speaks to the Moroccan artist who uses carefully staged portraits of Arab women to investigate the complexities of her contemporary sense of identity as a woman, an Arab and a Muslim

The New York-based Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi admits that when it comes to the discussion and reception of her work, she has had to develop something of a thick skin.

Carefully staged portraits of Arab women that are often larger than life-size, Essaydi’s photographs not only engage with the art of the past, but also combine traditional Arabic calligraphy, architecture and interiors to investigate the complexities of her contemporary sense of female, Arab and Muslim identity.

In photographs such as Bullets Revisited #21 (2013), which features thousands of carefully cut, polished and assembled cartridge cases, Essaydi reflects on the violence that engulfs the daily lives of so many women, while in other works she engages with the art of the past and the ways in which this continues to frame western views of the Islamic world.

Essaydi achieves this in pictures such as Les Femmes du Maroc: Harem Beauty #1 (2008) by echoing and critiquing the kind of western, erotically charged, 19th-century paintings of harems and odalisques that were identified as part of a colonialist “narrative of oppression” by celebrated Palestinian critic Edward Said in his influential 1978 text Orientalism.

Despite her profoundly political stance, Essaydi’s work has frequently attracted criticism, and she has been accused of not only perpetuating western stereotypes, but also of aping the very works and artists she sets out to critique.

“People couldn’t see the difference between my works and the original paintings, they couldn’t see that I was trying to engage the viewer and to criticise the paintings in a very, very subtle way,” the 61-year-old artist says from Marrakech. “In a sense, they didn’t know how to read my work, but I’m an artist, not a militant, and I can’t do away with the art.”

The most dogged criticism Essaydi’s work, she admits, is the charge it has faced since the very start of her career.

Essaydi’s professors at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had no problem with the issues she wanted to investigate: her sense of identity as a woman, a Moroccan, a Muslim and an Arab, and the prejudice and injustices of Orientalism, but they did take issue with the manner of her engagement.

“When I was studying for my master’s degree, my professors said my work was too beautiful, that it could not convey the messages I wanted to communicate” she says. “But for me, beauty in art is very important, it’s what attracts me to an artwork in the first place and so if I want to engage somebody, I’m not going to create something ugly and I couldn’t change anyway because my work is part of me.”

In art as in life, beauty has always held a double-edged appeal. Long-equated with perfection and the highest form of aesthetic achievement, beauty also arouses suspicion, associated as it was with seduction and temptation, and as it now is with being glib, old-fashioned and aesthetically irrelevant.

Despite the many charges, Essaydi’s commitment to both her subject matter and her particular treatment of it has never wavered, and she has answered her critics with a more-than-decade-long body of work that has been exhibited in international venues such the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington.

The artist’s first solo gallery show in the UAE, Leila Heller Gallery’s Lalla Essaydi: Still in Progress, features 15 works that span each of Essaydi’s major projects from 2003 to 2013.

The show’s title is taken from a quote by Essaydi that gets to the heart of the complexity that informs her work.

“I wish for my work to be as vividly present and yet as elusive as ‘woman’ herself,” Essaydi said in a 2015 monograph. “Not simply because she is veiled or turns away – but because she is still in progress.”

It was a very personal response and a sense of dissonance that spurred Essaydi’s engagement with 19th-century depictions of the Islamic Middle East by European artists such as Ingres, Delacroix and Gérôme.

“I always knew those paintings, but for me they were a fantasy, like a novel, something we know is not reality, but then, when after studying and after seeing what people thought about them in the West, I was driven to this kind of work,” the artist tells me.

“A lot of people still think that’s the way we live, but as an Arab woman, I don’t recognise myself in those paintings,” she adds. “That piqued my curiosity and made me think about my identity as an Arab woman, so in a way, I reencountered my own culture through Orientalist paintings.”

The bodies of work represented in Still in Progress – Converging Territories, Harem, Les Femmes du Maroc and Bullets Revisited – reveal both the continuities and discontinuities of Essaydi’s investigation.

All of the works include Essaydi’s hand-rendered henna calligraphy, written with a syringe, that she uses to cover her subject’s bodies and clothing like a veil, but whereas her earlier projects placed her subjects in a neutral setting, the latter use complex mises-en-scène, complete with traditional geometry, tiling and interiors, that often require years of planning to execute.

“When I started working, I started photographing women in amazing houses, but when I brought my work to the West, all people were seeing were the beautiful spaces – they weren’t seeing the women and that was disappointing,” Essaydi explains, reflecting on works that were often mistaken as the product of fashion or interior design shoots.

“I was curious why people couldn’t see it, and it was only when people were starting to understand what I was trying to do that I was able to reintroduce architecture and colour back into my work.”

Despite all of these details, Essaydi insists her focus is the women – friends, family and neighbours from her ancestral home in Marrakech – who remain her focus.

Essaydi organises gatherings of between 20 and 40 of these women every year in Morocco, during which the group spend anything from a week to a fortnight discussing their lives and the daily challenges they face.

It’s only once these discussions are finished that Essaydi starts on the construction of that year’s artwork, using transcriptions of the women’s conversations as the basis of her henna calligraphy, rendering each project a different chapter in the artist’s development and each her models a different page in the journal of her career.

“The photographic part of my work documents the experience I have with the women I work with,” Essaydi explains. “I have absolutely no audience in my mind when I am working, I do it for me and the women I work with.”

Lalla Essaydi: Still in Progress runs at the Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai until August 15, 2017. For more information, visit www.leilahellergallery.com

This article originally appeared in The National

Art: eL Seed’s towering new text in Ajman

The Dubai-based French-Tunisian artist adds to his UAE portfolio with a new project on an Ajman tower block

First it was Sharjah, then Dubai and now it’s Ajman’s turn for the eL Seed treatment.

On Sunday, the French-Tunisian artist announced the completion of his latest UAE-based project on Instagram with little more than an image and the mysterious hashtag #lesyeuxdanslesbleus.

The ornate blue, black and white mural adorns a tower block at the junction of Badr and Al Ittihad Streets in Ajman’s Al Bustan neighbourhood and like all of eL Seed’s work it features a quote written in Arabic, in this instance from Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the founding president of the UAE.

“On land and in the sea, our forefathers lived and survived in this environment. They were able to do so because they recognised the need to conserve it, to take from it only what they needed to live, and to preserve it for succeeding generations.”

With the completion of the work, Ajman now joins a growing list of international locations that can boast a major work by the artist including Paris, New York, Cape Town and Melbourne.

eL Seed completed his first public UAE-based project on an abandoned building on Sharjah’s Bank Streetin 2015 as part of a public art initiative, Jedariya (Arabic for walls), that was launched by the Maraya Art Centre.

His second public UAE-based installation, which features a poem, Positive Spirit, was completed on the walls of The Green Planet at Dubai’s City Walk in Dubai at the end of 2016.

“I always make sure that I am writing messages. There is a message, but there are also layers of political and social context and that’s what I am adding,” eL Seed told The National in January 2017. “The aesthetic is really important, that’s what captures your attention, but then I try and open a dialogue that’s based on the location and the choice of text.”

Other than making his inimitable mark on Ajman’s urban fabric, the meaning of eL Seed’s latest work is unclear. The artist, who has a studio at Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, has described the work as “a taste of Sidi Bou Said in Ajman”, referring to a town on the north coast of Tunisia that is famous for its beauty and its white traditional architecture, which often sports blue sun shades and blinds.

Given eL Seed’s Franco-Tunisian heritage, the hashtag and reference might also be a riff on the blue of the ocean, the lyrics of Edith Piaf or even the eye-shaped nazar amulets that are used throughout the Mediterranean as charms against the power of the evil eye.

This article originally appeared in The National

 

Photography: Laura El-Tantawy – Beyond Here is Nothing, GPP Dubai

“Enclosed between four walls, the sound of silence never seemed louder. It’s claustrophobic. I wait for the phone to ring, check for emails obsessively, eat everything out of the fridge. The hunger remains. I feel like if I dig my hand deep into my soul, I will find nothing. The awareness I am experiencing is unspeakable. Faces change when we meet. Is their solitude reflected in mine? There is an awkward silence. In it, a minute feels like an hour. An hour a day. A day can be a lifetime.”

Laura El-Tantawy, Beyond Here is Nothing

A disembodied shadow caught on a foliage-etched wall, birds in flight over the blurred silhouettes – or are they shadows – of Casuarina trees and vibrating date palms and a young man’s head wreathed in billows of greasy-looking smoke are just some of the oneiric images that comprise Egyptian photographer Laura El-Tantawy’s latest project, Beyond Here Is Nothing.

Featuring sometimes experimental photographs that have captured on her mobile phone, Beyond Here Is Nothing represents the second chapter in El-Tanawy’s ongoing journey of self-exploration, an investigation of her fractured sense of identity and her unfulfilled quest for a place she can call home.

Born in the UK to Egyptian parents, El-Tantawy lived in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the US before she moved back to Egypt in 2007 with the aim of finally settling down.

Living and working there throughout the Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, the artistic result of El-Tantawy’s journey was the body work that became In The Shadow of the Pyramids (2015), a book that won the photographer numerous awards and set both her career and her life on its current path

A personal journey made over the course of six tumultuous years, In the Shadow of the Pyramids offered an emotionally charged and profoundly personal take on the 2011 Egyptian revolution as well as a lyrical meditation on notions of identity, both personal and national.

The product of the photographer’s attempt to turn the country of her childhood dreams and family holidays into her adult home, In The Shadow of the Pyramids resulted in a significant psychological and emotional toll which unfolds, obliquely, throughout Beyond Here Is Nothing.

“I was always looking for Egypt as a home. A place to live in, to have a family in, to take root. All of the things that you to attach to the idea of home,” El-Tantawy explains, speaking from London, her base for much of the last decade.

“But I hadn’t spent any time there as an adult. I only knew it from the very innocent perspective of a child,” she admits.

“After seeing the revolution and how it culminated, all the people that died and the lives that changed, I realised that Egypt wasn’t a place where I wanted to live.”

In letting go of the idea of Egypt as anything other than a poetic, ancestral and emotional home El-Tantawy feared that she was letting go of her identity.

“Can I still say I am Egyptian with a sense of confidence,” she offers, “if I don’t live there?”.

Even before In The Shadow of the Pyramids, El-Tantawy had already experienced the same confusing mixture of cosmopolitanism, loneliness and dislocation that defines the earlier years of so many third culture individuals, children who are raised in a culture other than their parents’.

“It’s certainly not unique to me, but I feel that growing up between two very different cultures and constantly trying to navigate between them comes at a certain emotional weight that you carry with you,” the photographer explains.

“The friction between the cultures seeps into relationships, into communication, into language. I sometimes think in Arabic but I speak in English and it doesn’t really make much sense,” she says.

“Eventually you feel pushed away emotionally from the places where you spend most of your time. How do you wake up from that? I feel like the camera became a tool that allowed me to reflect on that.”

Beyond Here Is Nothing is full of such reflections as well as vignettes of ungraspable moments. Full of shadows, double exposures, blurred outlines and spectral silhouettes, a melancholy portrait of restless rootlessness that is neatly summed up by El-Tantawy’s haunting description of her own sense of loneliness.

“Enclosed between four walls, the sound of silence never seemed louder. It’s claustrophobic. I wait for the phone to ring, check for emails obsessively, eat everything out of the fridge. The hunger remains,” she writes.

“I feel like if I dig my hand deep into my soul, I will find nothing. The awareness I am experiencing is unspeakable. Faces change when we meet. Is their solitude reflected in mine? There is an awkward silence.”

Simultaneously open to interpretation and opaque, universal and specific, Beyond Here Is Nothing explores similar territory to that mined by the self-taught Franco-Algerian photographer Bruno Boudjelal.

Photographic journeys through identity’s shadowy hinterlands, they question profoundly cherished notions identity while encouraging viewers to explore and confront their own.

This article originally appeared in Portfolio – Alserkal Avenue

Art: Haleh Redjaian, Inhabiting the Grid at Gallery IVDE, Dubai

Fascinated by grids, lines, spaces and what she describes as ‘natural geometry’, Haleh Redjaian is an artist who has always operated within Minimalism’s interstices, using hand-rendered lines, weavings and thread to subtly undermine the apparent perfection of Modernism’s orthogonal warp and weft.

Her work may use graphite and graph paper, acrylic, woollen carpets and lengths of polyester yarn but in its engagement with what Gaston Bachelard once described as the poetics of space, it manages to combine the visual grammar of Western Modernism with the craft practices of her Iranian heritage.

After studying art history in her native Germany, Redjaian’s formal training was steeped in the traditions of the Bauhaus, whose female pioneers she admires.

She also openly acknowledges her admiration for artists such as Sol Lewitt, but in her choice of materials and collaboration with traditional carpet weavers, her practise blurs the illusory distinctions between order and disorder, tradition and modernity, East and West in a manner that also recalls Alighiero Boetti.

“We like systems and grids because they give us something that we can recognise, a frame that we can work within, but I like the idea of imperfection, the point at which the grid starts to break down,” Redjaian tells me from her studio in Berlin.

“When a grid is bigger it means there is a bigger hole that something can pass through. Even if the grid becomes thinner in one place it becomes bigger somewhere else. There is a movement in it which makes the whole thing more approachable, more human,” she says.

“Its the same with the weavings that I work with. They are hand woven which means that there are irregularities in them. There is already the irregularity in the wool and that often makes things more alive.”

Untitled (C_XXVII) is an example of the tensions that can be found throughout Inhabiting the Grid, Redjaian’s second solo show at Alserkal Avenue’s Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde (Gallery IVDE). 

A plain woollen rectangle hand woven by traditional carpet makers from Kerman, Iran, it is embellished with black lithography and threads that form a geometric pattern that distorts and puckers thanks to the irregularities in the wool’s undulating surface.

If Untitled (C_XXVII) is evidence of the material and intellectual continuities in Redjaian’s oeuvre, similar works featured in In-Between Spaces, her previous solo show at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in 2015, Notes for Daydreaming(2017-2018) represents something of a departure.

Consisting of 20 sketches executed on pieces of paper 19.5cm square, Notes for Daydreaming are not only smaller and less finished than Redjaian’s previous works but they also represent a subtle shift in focus.

Redjaian’s work is often described as space-specific. The artist will complete or instal works such as site-specific wall drawings – Lewitt again – that respond directly to the spaces where they are exhibited or to architectural structures, as was the case with In-Between Spaces, the central eponymous exhibit of her previous solo show.

Instead Redjaian’s Notes for Daydreaming turn inwards to chart the contours ofthe artist’s imagination, automatic sketches that are nevertheless rendered with Cartesian precision.

The idea for the works came from Redjaian’s recent reading of Bachelard and in particular his discussion of the influence of architectural spaces on our early lives and the way this resonates as we age.

“He writes about how our home as a child and certain spaces push us towards daydreaming. Whether that’s our bed or the view from a  window,” the artist explains.

“We talk about daydreaming less and less because reality is nothing to dream about but in these times, dreams are the things that keep us going.”

Redjaian describes these spatial, architectural and intellectual influences as traces, which makes her Notes haiku-like meditations on life, space and aesthetic experience.

“Sometimes we have to work against traces because they should not overpower you, sometimes we get so influenced by things you wonder is this me?,” Redjaian admits.

“But my traces are not your traces and if you use the things that leave marks in a good way, it’s the most important thing. It’s who we are.”

This article originally appeared on Folio – Alserkal Avenue.

^{Haleh Redjaian’s Inhabiting the Grid opened at Gallery IVDE on March 19 2018, during Art Week at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai. Images courtesy of the artist and Gallery IVDE.}