Women of Vision: How Moza Al Falasi’s practice preserves Emirati women’s stories

Moza Al Falasi is drawn to what people leave behind: an object still holding the imprint of its owner, a familiar room transformed by absence, a gesture passed through generations without anyone naming its origin. For the Dubai-based multidisciplinary artist, grief is a force that changes the meaning of everyday things. Her work traces these changes through painting, mixed media, photography and printmaking, turning private experiences of loss into wider meditations on identity, belonging and cultural memory.

The Fine Arts graduate from Zayed University began exploring these subjects gradually, as personal loss sharpened her awareness of objects, spaces and memories. “Grief made me more attentive to what remains after someone is gone,” she says. Inheritance, within her practice, includes material possessions alongside stories, gestures and ways of seeing. Her art examines how these intangible legacies move between generations and how absence continues to shape both identity and presence.

Al Falasi’s Emirati heritage enters her work through the landscapes, architecture, materials and histories surrounding her. The UAE’s rapid transformation holds particular significance for an artist interested in layers of memory and the traces that development can obscure. Traditional practices and ordinary local materials become repositories of stories that might otherwise escape notice.

Her references often emerge through process and association. Found and discarded materials allow her to examine value, preservation and transformation, while reflecting the histories they have accumulated. “Being an Emirati artist also means that my understanding of these subjects is shaped by a place that has undergone enormous change within a relatively short period of time,” she says.

Each idea determines its own visual form. Al Falasi allows concept and material to develop together, leaving room for the act of making to redirect her research. Photography can preserve a fleeting moment or document something approaching disappearance. Painting offers space for emotional ambiguity. Found objects carry their previous lives into a work, while printmaking, books and repetition help her think through accumulation and memory.

This instinctive movement between mediums became more rigorous during Tashkeel’s Critical Practice Programme in 2024. The experience encouraged experimentation and pushed her to examine why she was creating a work, alongside what she was making. She regards it as a turning point in her professional development.

A year after her husband’s death, Al Falasi joined the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (SEAF) at a deeply vulnerable stage of her life. She was learning to navigate a changed personal and social identity as a widow and struggling to return to her practice. SEAF provided the structure, intensity and community she needed. Its fellows and mentors helped her reconnect with making, while challenging her to approach her work with greater discipline and clarity.

In 2025, her art appeared at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi, the Emirates Fine Arts Society Annual Exhibition, Al Marmoom: Film in the Desert and Gallery 25 in Australia. Seeing it in different cultural settings revealed how personal and local experiences can connect with audiences through shared ideas of memory, labour, absence and belonging. Distance also changed the reading of the work, allowing it to acquire meanings she had never anticipated.

For Al Falasi, Emirati Women’s Day recognises women’s visible achievements and the knowledge, care, stories and values they carry. Women have long preserved culture through family histories, traditions, objects and daily acts of care. Her own contribution lies in giving these forms of inheritance a visual life.

“Our stories are still being written,” she says. Art allows Al Falasi to honour what she has inherited, question it and transform it, creating work that carries memory forward into whatever comes next.