Out of the fire: How pioneering Emirati artist Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim found his voice

He is now recognised as a pioneer of contemporary Emirati art, with works in major institutional collections such as the Guggenheim Foundation, but Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim didn’t always feel like his art had a place in the world. In fact, in the late 1990s, he was in the throes of an artistic crisis so severe that he set fire to two truck-loads of his own artwork.

“Every person sometimes reaches this place, this Bermuda Triangle within,” he says. “It is a zone of disintegration, a loss of awareness. I reached that stage in 1999. I had a lot of works, almost everything from the beginning up to that time. They were in two trucks. I didn’t know where to put them, I didn’t have place to put them.”

Ibrahim took the artworks to the mountains of Khor Fakkan, where he piled them into a colourful heap and set them ablaze. Paintings, works on paper and sculptural forms withered in the fire and turned to ash. “Dust to dust,” Ibrahim says. “The works came from those mountains and they returned to the mountains.”

Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim's works draw from the landscape of his native Khor Fakkan. Photo: John Varghese / National Pavilion UAE La Biennale di Venezia

Now 63 years old, the artist recognises that he acted out of psychological strain, a feeling that local audiences weren’t able to “read” his art.

The episode may have almost severed him from his practice, but instead, it marked a turning point. The day after, Ibrahim was creating art again and with unprecedented clarity.

“The moment changed me,” he says. “My works were already provocative before that – not because they themselves were provocative, but because society was unable read them. But after that, I started considering their nature as an aspect of the work. They became deliberately provocative.”

The Emirati artist is creating a new body of work in Cairo. Photo: Hussein Mardini

Despite the societal disconnect, Ibrahim was not alone. He was surrounded by a group of like-minded artists, each of whom would contribute to the development of contemporary Emirati art.

Up until the mid-1980s, Ibrahim had learnt to nurture his passion for art in isolation, fuelled by the books that his brother-in-law would send him from the UK.

“Books about art and art history and biographies in English,” Ibrahim explains.