The Art Centre

Mai Al Moataz

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Mai Al Moataz is an artist who uses film cameras, develops in darkrooms, and collects dead roses. She lives and works in Bahrain as an artist, archivist, project director and interior designer.

Obsessed with producing portraits using black and white film, Al Moataz creates her photographs through a meticulous analog process, which can be seen as a deeply personal cathartic ritual. Her images are romantically solitary and ethereal, as they present emblems of duality, nostalgia and femininity. With hints of isolation and speckles of imagination, she explores the subjects of her portraits as a paradox of the internal versus the external, and where they meet, using time and space to deconstruct the fictional from the experiential universe. 

Her work annotates the dichotomies that are continually constructed to represent our many selves. The rift between the expected and the actual, the hidden and the apparent,  the emotional and the composed. By merging seemingly incompatible worlds into one, she presents a facade where the possibility of the annulment of a fixed identity is a dream.



Selected Works