Entering Talal and Ziad Al Najjar’s studio feels like walking onto the set of a 1990s slacker movie. In the Emirati brothers’ shared apartment-turned-workspace, the main room is filled with Ziad’s large, inscrutable canvases. The bedroom is a hangout space, with smaller paintings and sculptures by Talal. Here, the Dalai Lama is pinned up next to a poster of the David Cronenberg twin thriller Dead Ringers. A TV rests on a console overflowing with books that run the gamut from Bauhaus and Marxist philosopher Bifo to Islamic architecture, formaldehyde photography and medieval bestiaries. A stack of PS4 games shares space with a Diptyque room spray and a 3D-printed statuette of Talal in a goblin mask.
“I’m messier than Ziad and I like stuff more than Ziad. When I work, I like having random things around,” Talal explains as we sit on the powder-blue couch. “When I was a kid, I was obsessed with costumes. I want to start making videos where I do more performative stuff, playing these characters or something.”
“We can make masks,” offers Ziad, who has been experimenting with using latex and tattoo guns in his canvases, which intimate both human ribcages and spiny, spotty nudibranch roadkill. “There’s just something about working on fabric, stretched or not, and thinking directly on this material,” he explains, “regardless of whether it’s painting or not.”
