Montage...Express Yourself

Art forms like graffiti and tattoo have always intrigued me. Don't get me wrong I do not encourage vandalism nor do I agree with permanently scaring your body. The art form itself is what piques my interest. Furthermore my creative writing blog should be enough evidence that I am very much a fan of self expression in all it's forms. This is one of the greatest purposes of art. 

Also I want to say a big thank you to Rashad Iqbal, a fellow student who graciously let me pry into his life for the purposes of this article and whose great insight made my article relevant.

So without further ado, my third montage piece...

Express yourself

When the staff of my high school got tired of watching students doodle on tables, walls and bathroom stalls they started throwing out hints about a graffiti wall. The concept meant that everyone could scribble their heart away on a wall built solely for that purpose if we stopped marking our territory on the body of the school.

There was hardly a part of Manchester that was truly devoid of graffiti and although it wasn’t always the most attractive, the brashness and the hurried feel that came with it was always attractive to me. After a while, seeing large spray painted letters and bold colours became the norm.

Dubai was a rude awakening for me. It felt like I had spent my life dreaming in colour and woke up to black-and-white. That was when I first started to recognise graffiti as an art form. I was sure that there was no graffiti here. But that isn’t strictly true. It might not be the invading kind you find in most of the western world, but it’s there if you look hard enough. It might not be all over the walls in between clean-cut buildings or on the busy streets, but the art is recognised by some here.

One of my first graffiti experiences in Dubai came from Rashad Iqbal, a 2^nd year student here in our very own Middlesex. As soon as I saw his work I asked him to do some things for me one of which he handed to me and has been with me ever since.

Speaking of the challenges of being a graffiti artist in Dubai he says that “there isn’t much support and at the same time all the paint supplies are really expensive here which makes it really hard to practice.” He also goes on to explain that not being able to see other people’s work around you on a daily basis like you would in other parts of the world means that he often lacks motivation and inspiration.

So how do you overcome these challenges? Well according to Rashad you need to develop your own interest and find an online community; his would be deviantart.com. He finds that although there are graffiti artists here in Dubai, they don’t have the strongest community presence. “When it comes to a community the strongest I have experienced was at deviantART.”

What you might find even more surprising is the fact that Rashad has actually displayed his work on a wall in Dubai. In fact he and about 350 other people were part of the charity event at the Graffiti Tunnel in Dubai Festival City organised by GYEM in 2010. He says that “they provided legal areas to do graffiti.”

As much as we laughed at our teachers in high school for making a big deal out of nothing, there was a tiny part of me that felt like a vandal when I took my marker pen out to hurriedly scribble “MiiMii was here” on my science desk. Maybe that was part of the thrill but more than anything was the recognition that graffiti could also be an art form.