[gallery size="full" td_select_gallery_slide="slide" ids="94683,94684,94685,94686"]By Mariam Nihal Saudi Gazette Design Week in Dubai highlights the prominent art scene in the city and is the place to be for art lovers around the world. Al Serkal avenue, a popular art district in Dubai is home to major art galleries, exhibitors and international artists. Prototype is an ongoing exhibition at the Mojo gallery that highlights the virtue of emotions through expressions that are curtailed and remain impassive on the surface. It imposes an important question- ‘are those faces staring at us or looking through us into another world?' The Emirati artist is an award winning writer and the cultural commentator and manager of the UAE Writer's Union in Abu Dhabi. Born in 1962, Al Mazrouei is also a poet who get up in Egypt and often incorporates elements of both cultures in his artwork. Al Mazrouei uses his love for acrylic and pastel to create faces, generate feelings and scenarios on canvas. The gleaming gallery doors open up to a prelude written on a wall that reads: ‘We stand faced with eyes in shocking faces, leaving us with a sense of horror, until a closer look takes us to their stillness within, uninterested in anything or anyone on the outside.' Through structures that are incomprehensible on the surface Mazrouei delves deeper into them to decipher their soul and inanimate impression. "The self's dream of a bandaged self in possession of an emotional project that goes beyond the limit of the face to the body, as if the face in its clarity is nothing but a hurdle, the unveiling of which is the body," Mazrouei explains. He describes the Fayum portraits as being incomplete on the surface yet pulls one deep in its perpetual desire for completeness. This is a notion that any artist can dismantle yet helps propel the audience to go beyond the surface and either sink into that permanent abyss of despair or put an end to that state of isolation. The Mojo Gallery is a multifunctional artspace that is home to contemporary art form and brings together unique and creative art forms, design and new media. The gallery focuses on progressing through conceptual content, aesthetic values and their execution skills. They help develop emerging artists by providing them a platform with solo or group exhibitions providing public exposure. The Mojo gallery aims to engage a wider audience to come together to innovative and create art by taking risks, debating and asking questions.
