Rising son
“You’ll find me in Sharjah in the mornings, taking in the sights and sounds of the city of arts and culture.”
Creative and Sharjah native Ali Mrad is passionate about the city of his birth. Rooted in its soil for all of his 30 years, he is, he says, a tree that has grown strong on the nutrients it provides. For 12 of those years he has guided guests and visitors around the Sharjah he knows—a canvas for culture and the arts, a city that blends modernity and tradition and sees no conflict between the two, a gateway to spectacular nature. “I saw that I could change the perception of Sharjah, and I took joy in that.”
As he drives to work each morning at the Sharjah Art Foundation, he passes the landmarks he captured for this photo essay: the proud monument he climbed as a child; the port where traders landed their cargo for sale in the Old Souk he visited with his mother. “I pass my childhood every morning. It’s like a video, a timeline of my life. I watch this film every day and I never get bored of it. It makes me happy, it makes me feel connected.”
Trained in interior design and a multidisciplinary artist, Ali’s inspirations are broad: architecture and urbanism; Japanese culture born from his love of anime; art; sustainability; mornings and the golden hour. He notes that Sharjah means “rising sun”. He is, he says “a son of the sun.” His artistic outlets include digital art, pencil sketching, animation, photography and writing. —Peter Drennan
THE WATERFRONT (top), photograph by Ayesha Khalifa bin Suroor
Before Port Khalid, the city’s trade gateway, was moved to the other side of the creek, fenced and professionalised, it occupied the shoreline in front of Sharjah’s Old Souk. Traders would unload goods—from India and Iran—to sell in the marketplace. When he accompanied his mother to the souk—she, like others, would shop for kitchen and homewares here—Ali would watch the boats, impressed by them, their shapes, their colours, the variety of goods they unloaded, and the restless activity of the traders.
The port still draws him. Early, often on Fridays, he will come to watch the movement of the boats. It inspired him to create an artwork, Vinca Flower. Vinca, small and colourful, sun-loving and heat-tolerant, grow everywhere in Sharjah, by the side of the road, and here beside the port. It has medicinal properties, it lowers blood pressure and cures insomnia. Watching the boats, Ali says, is like meditation, the same effect the vinca would bring about. The artwork, he says “is a way of saying ‘I love you’ to Sharjah.”
TIME PORTALS
“I’m inspired by natural light. I wish it were used more often in interior design.” In this underpass beneath Al Wahda Street, which emerges next to an old Omani halwa shop, Ali captured the light’s playfulness. How the shadows and the shapes metamorphose as the sun passes overhead, and the light filters through the mashrabiya above. Before cars and taxis crowded Sharjah’s streets, the underpass was the family’s passage from home to the city on foot. The Central Souk, designed by a British architect and opened in 1978, is one of Sharjah’s defining landmarks. The shops inside are a treasure trove of paraphernalia. In this antique shop, on the upper level, are lanterns, clocks, copper pans, telescopes, old photographs and dallahs. “There is a story behind every single piece. When I hold an object, I have a film in my head. The alleys of the souk are a network of history, culture and art.” He went to the souk recently to search for a necklace, one with sentimental value, a replica in fact of a piece he had worn as a child. Armed with a photo, he approached the traders without success. In the last shop he tried, they found it, the last they had. “I wanted something sentimental, something that would connect me to my childhood.” Does he go to the souk often? “No, only for memories. But every time I pass it I try to analyse a new detail of it, and there are always new details.”
CLOSER TO THE SKY
“This has a special place in my heart, it’s a place I connect to.” The monument in Al Majaz Park—the bow of a traditional dhow emerging from a majestic Arab fort, one of a series of landmarks that dot the city by Spanish architect and sculptor Carlos Marinas Rubio—features prominently in Ali’s childhood memories. As it does, he suspects, for many Sharjah-born Emiratis. As a child, perhaps seven, maybe younger, he would go with family and neighbours to the park and climb the monument. It seemed so mighty then, insurmountable even. Once at the top he wondered how he would get down. Ali was always obsessed with adventure, but this was before he became an explorer. The dhow, the most symbolic of Arab seafaring craft, is then a fitting metaphor. The park, now divided in two by Corniche Street, is not a tourist attraction Ali says, but it is nostalgic for those who call the city home.
AL SHUWAIHEAN
Some places appear more than once in the reel of your life. The setting is the same but the memories they yield and the chapters they define are different. That is true of this building, the majlis or Sheikh Mohammed Building in Al Shuwaihean, just behind the Old Souk. From 2004 to 2009, in the scorching hot summers, Ali came to this building, then the Sharjah Art Institute, to learn about art. Today, the space belongs to the Sharjah Art Foundation, where Ali works. Offices, and many people he admires, are above; the gift shop he curates and manages is below.
