Mihrab: Mysticism, Devotion, and Geo-Identity

Athoub N. Al Busaily: Congratulations on your brilliant show with Engage101. The outcome of the exhibition is positively significant.

Salman Al Najem: I’m really glad and happy with the response. Selling is an important part of being an artist, a lot of it has to do with my philosophy in creating my work. When I make art that goes to people’s spaces, it infiltrates it. My message is physically moving, from my studio to their house. The mere fact that my work is traveling outside the studio and existing in someone else’s space is a continuation of its life.

A.B.: Art has always infiltrated multiple spaces and it's interesting to see the impact it creates when being displayed in different settings. It’s not just about monetary gain, that is just a side effect.

S.N.: Exactly, when my work moves outside the studio it continues its life-cycle. I want to literally and physically spread love. 

A.B.: Your Mihrab is not how it is in “real life”, it is not an object of ornament,  there’s no iconography or decoration, only colors. It reminds me of how when we look at the sun, the inside of our eyelids pick light and transform it into an intangible wash of colors. Your figures are drawn with careful observations, however, there’s an absence of details in the Mihrab. Why did you choose to have those two ends of the spectrum?

S.N.: The thing about the sun is that it was one of the starting points for this work. I have always wanted to make paintings of what it looks like when you close your eyes. I wanted to create an ethereal world that doesn’t exist. Not bound to the rigidity of this one. I wanted the characters to seem as though they’re floating in space, a space that doesn’t exist, a liminal space that is not found in this reality. That’s definitely the reason why I did this, I wanted the tension that comes with the less concrete background. We can argue and say there’s no foreground, it is not standing, or sitting it’s just floating. There’s no depth, the depth is in the absence of depth.

A.B.: Khaleeji iconographies are carefully selected and depicted in some of your paintings. Did you deliberately choose such iconography to create a point of reference and establish relatability?

S.N.: Yes, definitely. Born as a Khaleeji man makes me want to talk about this experience. I want people around me to relate, and to represent the people, these times, and the culture. With the specific paintings, you’re talking about, the Khaleeji ones, where they’re skeletons and they’re still wearing their cultural dress and it’s like Khaleeji culture is so ingrained within us to the point where we act as though we will take this to our death.

A.B: It becomes like a biological identity.

S.N.: Exactly, it transcends the superficial and goes into the biological.