Curiosity with no limits
The work of interdisciplinary artist Abdulla Buhijji is as multidimensional as life itself.
By Nasri Atallah
The jargon around art and its practitioners can be confusing. Interdisciplinary. Experimental. Words are conjured to describe artists in a way that’s often beyond their control.
My first question to Bahrain-born, Dubai-based Abdulla Buhijji is more of a request: How would he define himself? “You started with the hardest question!” he says. “Maybe if I take a step back it’ll help.” It does. “Career-wise, I’m a creative consultant. And I’m an artist. As a creative consultant I work on placemaking, public art, and I curate exhibitions. I also consult on branding and user experience. As an artist, I’m a conceptual contemporary artist. I work within different themes, I don’t limit myself.”
Buhijji’s work has appeared in galleries and as public interventions. Some pieces he made alone, others in collaborations, more still under a pseudonym. It’s an impressive body of work for someone so young—he’s 28. He studied engineering management in Sharjah, but never worked in the field. He then studied product design in London, returning to the Gulf in 2017. That same year he scored his first exhibition, at Al Riwaq Art Space in Bahrain. He is now based in Dubai, where he is also part of Theories of Imagination, an immersive and interactive art collective.
He realised that he had become an artist through experimentation. “I didn’t know I wanted to do art. I didn’t know if what I was doing was even art, but it was a way to express myself. I used to write growing up, but I kept it to myself. I wanted an outlet. I started with calligraphy, when I was living in Sharjah. Even my calligraphy was experimental.”
Everything Buhijji does stems from curiosity, a confidence in going where an idea might lead. “I try to not define myself,” he says. “If people ask me, ‘Are you a designer?’ I reply, ‘If you want me to be’. If you see an art piece as design, then it’s design. If you see it as art, then it’s art.
Opening image: I WATER MY FLOWERS EVERY MORNING manipulated steel sculptures offer contorted reflections of the environment around them.
Everything Buhijji does stems from curiosity, a confidence in going where an idea might lead. “I try to not define myself,” he says. “If people ask me, ‘Are you a designer?’ I reply, ‘If you want me to be’.
“When people tell me ‘you don’t have one theme’ I tell them that human experience is not one theme, it’s multidimensional. You keep experiencing things. I don’t want to be lost in definitions and limit myself.” It echoes a Fernando Pessoa quote I had noted under one of his Instagram posts: “Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.”
He struggles to name his favourite piece. It makes sense, given his diverse practice. “Every time, I build on what I’ve done before,” he says. One piece does eventually stand out, I Water My Flowers Every Morning, created for the Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival 2021/2022. A series of steel sculptures were manipulated by folding which distorts the way they reflect the environment around them. Viewers approaching the work must confront and explore their contorted reflections.
“It’s one of my favourite works,” he says. “When I was given the theme ‘gradation’ by the organisers, it made me think. I started reflecting on myself. I never embraced gradation, I always wanted to be perfect. So it was an experiment for me.” The metal structures proved stubborn, unwilling to bend to his desire for perfection. “It became an unlearning process.”
Buhijji sometimes works under a pseudonym (“ijji”). Two pieces shown at the Paris Biennale in 2019—Forbidden Fruit and Pool Party—are a departure from work that is more recognisably his. They’re based on a segment from the back of sewage trucks in the GCC, complete with ladder, and rendered bright pop colours. It instantly reminds me of a Hockney pool.
“I see ‘ijji’ as a separate artistic entity that deals with personal narratives, feelings and states of mind with very specific and unified language and mediums,” he says. “Having it under a pseudonym gives me more space to be truly open, vulnerable and expressive with my pieces about these momentary feelings and thoughts.”
Top: SEVEN NIGHTS, TWO NIGHTS, AND ONE Thirty traditional drums chart the moon’s cycle. The work represents a song that counts down the days until a bride joins her husband’s house. Above: UNITY symbolises an abstract deconstructed flower. Its layered, interdependent units rely on each other for stability and strength.
I finally bring up my favourite work, two installations commissioned by 1971 Design Space to mark the UAE’s 50th national day which sit at the entrance to Flag Island in Sharjah. Called Unity and Growth, they were inspired by the words of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.
“The tree of the Union is bearing more fruit, its roots are extending, and its goodness is overflowing; and this tree shall so remain for all future generations.”
They are striking installations set in water. Unity symbolises an abstract deconstructed flower, but the robust structure hides a secret—it collapses if one of the components is removed. It underscores the concept of unity by layering interdependent units, where each depends on the others for stability and strength. Growth is made up of seven units which represent pages of the constitution. The form created represents an abstract flourishing flower with its petals open.
“It was very personal to me because I grew up between Bahrain and Sharjah,” Buhijji says. “I have a special relationship with Sharjah. It’s like a second home. The relationship my grandparents had with the place cultivated my love for it. When I did that exhibition, I wished my grandfather was alive so that he could be proud that I put something in that place he always called home.”
The piece was a collaboration with Noor Alwan, an experimental artist and architect based in Bahrain. “I am blessed with this artist relationship,” Buhijji says. It was an inauspicious beginning in 2018, when they were part of the same group exhibition. Out of curiosity, Buhijji checked out Alwan’s previous work and realised that the piece he was presenting was similar to something she had done in the past. He reached out to her, to make it clear this was a coincidence. Alwan was not perturbed. It was an early sign that they were operating on the same wavelength. A year later she would invite him to take part in an exhibition she was curating. And that’s where the symbiotic relationship took off.
“Most of our work now is in collaboration. Sometimes, when it’s too personal, we work on our own. It’s a weird relationship. With time, we switched roles. I usually like work to be finished, a by-product of my engineering background, and she prefers it to be organic. Recently we’ve switched roles on that,” he says, laughing.
This shape-shifting relationship is consistent with Buhijji’s approach to his work and life more broadly. Nothing is off limits, not even changing who you are fundamentally, in the pursuit of curiosity. It’s safe to call him an artist.
Photographs: “I Water My Flowers Every Morning” by Shouq NasRallah; “Seven Nights, Two Nights, and One” and Portrait by Ishaq Madan; “Unity” by Mohamed Mhaisen
