The National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates has announced Mohammed Kazem as featured artist and Reem Fadda as curator for the 55th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia.



Mohammed Kazem is a leading conceptual artist in the United Arab Emirates and is known for his incorporation of new media and his sophisticated formalist language. Fadda writes, “Mohammed Kazem, a pioneering contemporary artist and thinker from the UAE, represents a generation that emerged from an avant-garde legacy of arts and artists in the UAE and the surrounding region, one that has thrived since the mid-’70s with advocates such as his mentor artist Hassan Sharif. The curatorial research for our pavilions presentation in Venice will see Kazem as the key individual artist and thinker he is and highlight his contribution to the local artistic heritage.”



“By engaging the work of Kazem, we can witness the urban modernity of an emerging nation through the eyes of its individual artists. In pursuing this initiative we hope to demonstrate that the developments we see in the region today do not come from a void, but rather evolve from the contemporary thought and practice of artists and intellectuals like Kazem, whose work has consistently interrogated the relationship between the individual and his/her social, urban, and natural environments. In this sense, it manifests as a living artistic synthesis of a critical debate over the modernity and the global reality of the citizen and nation-state,” writes Fadda.