WeTransfer Guest Curator
Human interiority is at the heart of Hadeer Omar’s practice. While the Egyptian artist deploys new media, such as extended reality technologies, she is driven by the age-old curiosity to understand what makes us who we are—the human psyche, our dreams, our stories. It’s no surprise, then, that she’s at her best when she collaborates, incorporating different voices and perspectives in her multimedia artworks. She tells Holly Black why building connections is crucial to the act of creating art.
Storytelling is the lifeblood of Hadeer Omar’s practice. The Egyptian new media artist, who is based in Doha, has always sought out human narratives when building her multifaceted works, which bridge film, photography, design, installation and more.
Rather than focusing on any specific process, she takes a hunter-gatherer approach to her subject matter. Every piece is built up carefully with layers of meaning, using whatever medium seems most appropriate for the message at hand.
Take, for example, “Fragmented Realities” (2019), an immersive multi-projection installation that explores people’s dreams. Omar presented these reimagined scenes by broadcasting them against mounds of bedroom pillows, thus creating a soft, familiar surface that feels innately connected to the inner workings of the mind.
Tweet this
I’m building my own parallel universe, where everyone is accepted.
“Dreams are very personal, but they are also universal, because it’s a process that happens to all of us,” the artist explains. “The way people describe them represents the most brilliant storytelling. They set up the time, the space, the mood. You become immersed in their world through your imagination.”
The piece was conceived during Omar’s residency at Doha Fire Station, and was born of her need to get under the skin of the human psyche as the world began to shut down as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “I’m very interested in the mind and how it can deceive us,” Omar says. “The more we learn about the brain the less we understand it.”
She invited both her friends and her students at VCUarts Qatar, where she is an assistant professor, to partake in this surreal collaboration, which involved storyboarding and creating brief, evocative videos expressing their chosen nighttime vision.
Such a work, which includes honoring multiple voices, languages and perspectives, exemplifies the artist’s practice. She not only built a physical space that conjured a state of unconscious reality, but fostered intimate connections with the participants, many of which have continued to flourish. There is no doubt that she thrives on collaboration: “I don’t work alone, ever. Even if it starts that way, I have mentors and collaborators who I can share my thoughts and ideas with.”
In most cases, her work calls for a wider team that might include performers, lighting designers, sound engineers and more. For the experimental documentary, “Gihan” (2023), which deploys virtual reality and 360-degree shots, the artist worked with a trusted team to bring the story of a female jewellery-maker to life. The protagonist served as something of a proxy for Omar’s own experiences as a young Egyptian woman growing up in the 80s and 90s, and grappling with mental health.
“We are so similar,” says Omar, “but she can express what we were feeling so much better than I ever could. I can’t work with people without having a connection with them first. You need to trust them. You need to depend on them. You need to know their backstories and their intentions.”
This need for visceral, human connection can be traced back to her childhood, where she was surrounded by makers, as opposed to traditional fine artists. She was particularly inspired by her mother. “At an early age she would take me to museums, and I’d see all these incredible statues and objects and materials, but I’d have no idea what I was looking at,” Omar says. “She started translating them into stories for me to digest.”
The artist has also been inspired by her mother’s own creative resourcefulness— including making clothes and taking photographs—and credits growing up in a household that celebrated creativity and independent thinking: “I was raised debating the heck out of everything. I was not convinced with our norms and traditions and the rights and the wrongs—why religion is saying this and why culture is saying that.”
Thinking for oneself is something she now impresses upon her students, not to mention the need for self-motivation. Her own natural inquisitiveness has also brought her to self-educate, to better understand the visual language of her native Egypt and beyond. This collected knowledge feeds back into her practice, whether it be the aesthetics and materiality of renowned modernist architect Hassan Fathy, or Shadi Abdel Salam’s filmic universe. Abdel Salam worked across screenwriting, set and costume design, but only directed one feature film, a masterpiece of neo-realist Egyptian cinema called “Al-Mummia” or “The Night of Counting the Years” (1969). “He was involved in every single element of the film, from storyboarding to costumes, but he also had an amazing network of people with exceptional expertise,” she says.
Omar seeks to foster similar ecosystems in her own work, while nurturing mutually beneficial creativity. She has even extended this attitude to artificial intelligence, considering it an active participant in several text-prompt experiments. “I wanted to see what the technology could offer, beyond my own visual language,” she says. One series depicts men and women in traditional dress, playing football and filling stadiums, with all the eerie, spectral associations expected from AI-generated visuals.
This uncanny sensibility fascinated the artist, though she posits that the technology has now become too hyper-realistic to remain interesting. “I don’t want to capture life the way it is—I’m not an archivist,” she says. No matter the medium, the artist is interested in creating reimagined realities. “I’m building my own parallel universe, where everyone is accepted and everyone can celebrate.”
