VAE · Jugendkultur- und Modemagazin (MENA-Edition)
Engy Mahdy likes to be outside. The Dubai-based designer, artist and educator runs four times a week, rides horses three or four times and gets on her bike whenever she can. It’s a routine that might seem at odds with the unpredictability of a creative practice, but for Mahdy, one enables the other.
For Fuad Ali, movement is often where ideas begin to make sense. “When I struggle on ideas, I’ll go for a run,” he says. “An hour later, I clear up some of these problems that I have, and I can come back and finish it.
For Salman AlNajem, making art has always been a way of making sense of things that are difficult to articulate. His work pulls from Khaleeji popular culture and the world immediately around him, but beneath those familiar references sits something less tangible. “My work also has a metaphysical aspect to it,” he says.