Collection: Moza Almatrooshi

 Moza Almatrooshi is a multimedia conceptual artist based in Sharjah, UAE. 

Her work centers around storytelling, and power in social dynamics. Her focus on storytelling emerges in a magic realist form, reshaping historical narratives, playing with genres of stories such as fables or the coherence of stories through misaligned or partial translations, and strategically using il/legibility and silences to critique hegemony.

The artist’s concern with power in social relations manifests in examinations of hospitality, gender, nation, and military forces. Almatrooshi combines a variety of media to best articulate her message, working across audio, video, performance, food, land art, ceramics, and screenprinting.


© Eman Ali

Moza Almatrooshi, by Beth Derderian

Almatrooshi used video and food in “Irreversible Act I: Sugar Rush” (2017), a work that comments on the speed of urban development in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The film captures an aerial view of a pot on the stove. Mounds of white sugar slowly carmelizes into auburn flecks, a small spot at first that darkens and widens as the video continues. The crystals on the edge of the burned spot suddenly become individually visible, white against the brown background, before they too turn brown. The work represents the irreversibility, the irrevocability of some changes; once made, the original can never be recuperated.

After “Irreversible Act I,” Almatrooshi continued to work with film in her piece “To Whom The Sun May Be of Concern” (2018). Almatrooshi produced this 17-minute, 30-second video in response to the news that archaeologists working in the emirate of Sharjah had unearthed coins indicating that the region had once been ruled by a queen.

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Moza Almatrooshi (b. 1991- Dubai, UAE) in her practice looks at narratives from ancient and contemporary mythologies in the Arabian Peninsula, and the ways in which they uphold nation building techniques. This culminates in fictions and metaphors derived from regional food production practices and food politics.

In 2019 Moza gained an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art (UK) and a diploma in culinary arts from ICCA Dubai (UAE) in 2020. Her artworks have been performed in the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), selected by the ICA and BBC for the New Creatives project, and displayed in the second Lahore Biennale. Her writings have been published in ArabLit Quarterly, and by the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo.

She lives and works in the UAE as an multidisciplinary artist and pastry chef.

Praise Hiya, performance © Ryan Prince  

CV
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