Moza Almatrooshi

This spring, anyone driving past the busy landmark roundabout bearing the message “Smile, you are in Sharjah”, written in flowers, might notice the suddenly increased presence of bees. This would be thanks to the introduction of melliferous (honey-producing) plants by artist Moza Almatrooshi for this year’s Sharjah Biennial 15. The installation, organised in collaboration with the local Sharjah municipality, is part of a wider site-specific intervention at the Old Al Jubail market, where visitors can see two active hives from the Beekeeper’s Association and attend a public educational workshop.

These bee-focused initiatives are an attempt by Almatrooshi to raise awareness about the UAE’s bees, most of which are imported and therefore potentially threaten native species, and prompt us to recognise the important role played by bees in the wider ecosystem. In putting this kind of proposition to the city of Sharjah at large with a work that challenges easy categorisation, this third iteration of Almatrooshi’s ongoing The Agriculture School series (2022) also raises questions about the boundaries of conceptual art. “What does it mean to be an artist and try to give this issue a form, to intervene in something that is difficult to label as art?” she asks. “Also, how best to present this project to people as a cultural endeavour?”

lthough she now lives and works in Sharjah, Almatrooshi was born in Dubai in 1991 and grew up in Ajman. She does not recall a specific moment when she knew she wanted to be an artist, but had a range of interests that included politics and media. “I was always interested in things that had a communicative aspect to them, a back and forth with other people,” she recalls. She settled on a BFA in Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University in part because she felt art gave her “freedom of expression, especially in a place where there’s not a lot of that.” While the course encompassed printmaking, painting and photography, Almatrooshi specialised in interior design in the hope of learning more practical, employable skills. Unexpectedly, her studies engendered in her “a fascination with space. We had a very traditional way of learning, even if digital modes were available. I had to think about how differently space can look because you’re the one who’s drawing that mark.”

This interest quickly extended beyond the inhabited realm and even the city into the mountainous landscape of the UAE, which Almatrooshi began to explore independently in her spare time. “That’s when it started to become a bit more palpable for me,” she remembers. “I think one of the most natural things for any artist is to be reactive to their environment.” She was particularly interested in how human activities like quarrying changed the natural landscape in order for us to build our own urban environments, and sociopolitical and ecological l themes like these were already starting to show up inadvertently in her university projects. “For me it was about observing, not remarking, on how the landscape is changing and expressing a loss or an absence.” 

After graduating in 2013, Almatrooshi was nominated for the Shaikha Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship in partnership with Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the successful completion of which gave her access to a scholarship. She applied to do an MFA at the Slade in London, which she chose for its sculpture programme and because “it wasn’t uber-traditional or formal. I felt it opened up, for me, new ways of exploring things.” It was in this environment that she felt free to start working with food. “It became a major element of my work, whether as the medium, the tool, the metaphor or the container,” she says. Initially, Almatrooshi feared that food might be perceived as just a trendy topic, or that her work would be reduced to a theatrical dinner. “I was very deliberate about not romanticising food because I was looking at food more as a divisive element, something that can be weaponized,” she says. “Not in the sense that people often think of food as bringing people together and starting conversations.” Her work, instead, became an “endless experimental inquiry into what food can do, what it can communicate,” an approach that tended to centre around politics and geography.

Before graduating in 2019, Almatrooshi had started organising performance pieces focused on one simple ingredient. These included Praise Hiya and Evergreen, which featured dates and pomegranates respectively. When she returned to Sharjah, however, she qualified as a pastry chef so that she could produce more complex works. At Art Dubai in March this year, she performed The Alphabetics of the Baker, during which visitors to the fair could watch her kneading dough for hours before baking and handing out the bread. These acts drew attention to the gestural rhythms of baking as its own form of choreography, as well as to the invisible labour behind food preparation.

The predominant focus of Almatrooshi’s art for the past five years, however, has been bees and honey. The interest originated out of the short film To Whom The Sun May Be of Concern (2018), a fictional fable of a queen bee who is ejected from the hive by her colony but comes across a coin that had once belonged to an ancient queen and sets out on a quest to find her. The narrative is fragmented and occasionally the footage is blurry or incoherently layered with clips of real-life women who exist in the public eye – or “queen bees” – like the pop singers Ahlam and Fifi. “I was really struck by the organisation of bees as being almost militarised,” explains Almatrooshi. “They could do something that we as humans would consider cruel, yet at the same time produce something so sweet. It felt like there was more I could draw from this metaphor.” 

To continue exploring the idea, however, Almatrooshi decided her art should be grounded in research. She enrolled in a course at the UAE’s Beekeepers Association and also shadowed a beekeeper who became the subject of a film, There is an Edible Gold (2021), commissioned by Art Jameel. The work documents his sustainable and sensitive practice, as well as exploring how humans have entered into an interdependent, co-operative relationship with bees in order to make honey, which in Islamic culture has important mystical and healing properties.

As Almatrooshi’s food-centred works have brought her attention to urgent ecological issues, her practice has naturally returned to the landscape that first inspired it. “You cannot get away from these themes,” she explains. “At some point they collide, and that is really where my practice lives at the moment.” For The Agriculture School, she went on a research trip looking into food production, security and sovereignty in the UAE’s mountainous regions. The first iteration of the series, part of the exhibition On Foraging at 421 in Abu Dhabi, showed audiences how the locals themselves record their surroundings, presenting their personal photographs alongside a mural depicting a rural town where a former spring had since dried up. Here, however, in a painting by neighbourhood artist Sayed, the town is shown still flowing with fresh water. “I thought there was something so intriguing about presenting the image in this way,” she says of how this work exposes our temptation to idealise the agricultural industry. As the latest iteration of this project currently at the Sharjah Biennale shows, however, Almatrooshi is never short of inventive ways to reveal the harsher realities, as well as the innate beauty, of nature in all its complexity. 

This profile first appeared in Canvas 108: The Root of it All