This Art Newspaper interview, by Lee Cheshire, ran alongside Zeinab AlHashemi's nomination for the Richard Mille Art Prize and centres on her Camouflage series, large-scale sculptural works made using camel skin. AlHashemi, who was born in the UAE in 1988 and works from Dubai, describes the material as a way of bringing "the idea of commodity, the history of the camels and the culture of the camel breeders" into a contemporary art context.
The piece traces where Camouflage has travelled: an installation set in the Saudi Arabian desert at AlUla, and a hide-covered wireframe obelisk shown before Egypt's pyramids that references an unfinished obelisk at Aswan. It also discusses her presence at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where The Fourth Pillar (2022) took the form of an incomplete column combining natural and man-made materials, echoing the museum's own supporting pillars, following an earlier Louvre work, Metamorphic (2018), that combined reinforced metal mesh with stained glass.
AlHashemi tells the paper she came to art after a car accident, and that her practice now runs across workshops and multiple media rather than relying on handmade technique alone. Read together, the works discussed trace a single, consistent interest: materials tied to Gulf land, labour and history, reworked at architectural scale for major regional and international venues.
