1975–present
Ebtisam Abdulaziz
The Emirati artist Ebtisam Abdulaziz was born in Sharjah in 1975 and came to art from mathematics. For one performance she put on a black suit covered in bright green numbers and stood in the middle of a roundabout. She works with geometry and numbers, makes installations, photographs and video, and wrote about art for the magazine Al Tashkeel. She took part in the UAE pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Biography
One of her best-known actions looks simple: the artist, in a black suit covered with light green numbers, stands on a roundabout in Sharjah. It was after this, as is generally held, that Ebtisam Abdulaziz established herself in the art life of the Emirates.
She was born and grew up in Sharjah, in 1975. She did not go to art school: in 1999 she graduated from the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain with two bachelor’s degrees, in mathematics and in science. She later said more than once that numbers hold a special place in her life and constantly catch her attention. Since 2000 she has worked with the magazine Al Tashkeel and writes about art for other publications. She is a member of the Emirates Fine Arts Society, as well as of the Dubai Youth Theatre and Art Atelier. She places her practice in systemic art: the work is built on a rule that the viewer can read by following its order.
The best-known example of such a rule is the series “Autobiography”. In “Plate’s Numbers” the artist wrote down the digits of the car number plates she came across on journeys between the emirates and tried to find a mathematical link between them. Each journey became a separate work with its date, and the digits are laid out in dominoes. She chose dominoes for their strictness and for the dots that stand for numbers, and also because they are an object everyone knows from games. The series “Random Journeys” is arranged differently: she walked without a route, picked up plastic and scraps of metal and placed them in glass cylinders. For a series of drawings in 2012 she made about 150 sheets of rectangles, squares and hexagons that seem to shift when looked at for a long time.
Her first solo exhibition was held in 2007 at the Sharjah Contemporary Art Museum. In 2005 she took part in the Sharjah Biennial, and in 2009 in the UAE pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. In 2012 she showed work in “Arab Express” at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, in “25 Years of Arab Creativity” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and at the Benin Biennial. In 2013 came the solo exhibition “Autobiography” at The Third Line gallery in Dubai and “The Beginning of Thinking is Geometric” at the Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah; the same year she appeared in “Three Generations” at Sotheby’s in London. Then followed FotoFest in Houston and New York University Abu Dhabi (2014), “Blue Freedom” in Washington (2017) and “Gateway” at Manarat Al Saadiyat (2018). In 2012 she won first prize at the annual exhibition of the Emirates Fine Arts Society, and in 2014 second prize. Abdulaziz’s works are in the collections of the UAE Ministry of Culture, Deutsche Bank, the Renault collection in France and the Farook Collection. In 2013 Arabian Business magazine included her among the hundred most powerful Arab women, and in 2016 The Wall Street Journal named her one of the seven most exciting artists in the UAE.
To my mind, her works are better understood not as a story about something but as a problem to solve: until you work out by what rule the dominoes are laid or the sheets are drawn, you will understand nothing.
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