Hazbar with a model of her fountain installation for the Design Doha Biennial’s ‘Arab Design Now’ exhibition in November 2026 (Image credit: Olesya Asanova)
The Syrian-born, UAE-raised artist and designer Talin Hazbar was around ten years old when she began collecting an informal “materials library”, picking up stones and other objects from within the citadel in Aleppo while visiting her grandmother. The collection expanded in earnest while studying architecture at the American University of Sharjah, where she began gathering sand from across the UAE and beyond to experiment with mould-making. Many of these materials and tests now line the shelves of her studio in Sharjah Art Foundation’s Al Hamriyah complex, including pieces of calcified fishing nets and coral from the sea just beyond its walls.
“I’m fascinated by how materials behave and the forces that influence how they decay, accumulate and change shape,” says the artist, whose installations and designs have been exhibited internationally, from Louvre Abu Dhabi to the NGV Triennial in Melbourne. In her view, every mark and fissure in a rock functions like a scar, revealing shifts in weather patterns, ecologies, and social histories. These materials can also carry the weight of cultural memory.
When we speak, her studio is filled with components destined for her installation for the Arab Design Now exhibition at the Design Doha Biennial. The work is an abstract tribute to the bah-rah, the fountain traditionally situated at the centre of social and domestic life in Syrian homes. Rather than a single fountain, Hazbar has assembled stones from across the Levant into a totemic structure of interlocking fountains whose geometries appear simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.
“It questions what happens when such enduring structures, once central to domestic and communal life, are no longer at the heart of a courtyard,” she explains. The work, At the Center, Water Gathers What the City Remembers, reflects on the memories attached to materials and built forms without resorting to nostalgia. “It’s an invitation to imagine fragments, not as broken, but as evolving.”
For curator Noura Al Sayeh Holtrop, it is this dialogue between temporalities and traditions that distinguishes Hazbar’s practice. “Talin’s singular artistic approach combines the historical and the contemporary, drawing from her Syrian heritage. She has created a new ornamental language made from a collage of existing typologies.”
Although trained as an architect, Hazbar was always more interested in the materials from which buildings are made, and what those materials reveal about social history and landscape, than in architecture itself. “I was interested in vernacular architecture, and how it was born out of need and context,” she notes.
Her 2022 project Earth Readings in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, paid homage to regional traditions of adobe construction. Hazbar invited local residents to identify a place of personal significance, collected earth and stones from those sites, and used them to construct two walls comprising 1,360 mud bricks within a palm grove. As visitors moved through the narrowing passage between the walls, recordings of participants’ stories brought the landscape to life. The bricks were later scattered across the floor at Art Basel Paris in 2024, emphasizing the capacity of mud to be continually reshaped and reformed.
Many of Hazbar’s early works centred on sand, a material she continues to revisit because it “sits somewhere between a solid and liquid state.” Its unpredictability remains a source of fascination. Through the use of different binders, she experimented with freezing sand within moulds, creating objects ranging from lighting installations to domed sculptural forms.
“I became intrigued with working with sand to understand the landscape, but also to see how it responded in the studio,” she explains. Conversations with archaeologists later revealed parallels between their methodologies and her own. “It felt very close because my work is about excavating and giving space for uncertainty. I have to create my own system to navigate through a site sensitively and without definite answers. And there’s a strong sense of time embedded in the work.”
From these investigations emerged what Hazbar describes as “structures of impermanence”, an ongoing body of work exploring temporality through material and form. One example, Resting Grounds, first presented in Abu Dhabi in 2025 and later exhibited at Le Végétal art fair in France, takes the form of an undulating landscape of encrusted sand precariously supported by pins. Resembling human skin, the work functions as a metaphor for the intimacy and fragility of the relationship between land and body. As Hazbar describes it, the work proposes “art as a practice of excavation and care, attuned to the fragile entanglements of nature and time.”
The sea occupies a similarly important position within her practice. In 2017, while collecting sand on a beach, Hazbar encountered a fishing net covered with shells, salt, and organic matter. Fascinated by the ways organisms colonize discarded materials, she began conversations with local fishermen and marine scientists at the American University of Sharjah and NYU Abu Dhabi.
Working alongside fishermen, she submerged three traditional dome-shaped gargour fishing baskets, allowing crustaceans, molluscs, algae, and other marine organisms to accumulate over six months. Each component of the resulting project, Deposits, recorded the specific environmental conditions and species present at its location.
These investigations continued through her Accretions light sculptures. Hazbar submerged hand-forged steel armatures inspired by deformed gargour traps lost at sea, allowing marine life to complete their forms. The resulting structures suggest a mode of design developed in collaboration with natural processes rather than imposed upon them.
Sharjah’s port, located near her studio, remains a recurring site of research. It inspired Sediments, an ongoing series examining marine ecosystems, coastal communities, and environmental change. Working with fishermen and divers, Hazbar collects ghost fishing nets before compressing them into dense slabs.
“Each slab is a record of the time the materials have been left at sea,” she explains. More recently, she has begun sorting the recovered nets by colour and transforming them into modular, collectable objects whose swirling surfaces resemble marble. The project has also fostered awareness among local divers and fishermen regarding marine debris and coastal conservation efforts.
Questions of time, memory, and accumulation continue to run throughout Hazbar’s practice. These interests are shared by her sister Tulip Hazbar, a graphic designer and illustrator who frequently collaborates with her. Together they produced Abacus 52, a counting frame composed of marble and stone fragments that reflects acts of collecting, archiving, and record-keeping.
Tulip, whom Hazbar describes as an “archivist/hoarder” of printed matter, music, and film from Syria and the UAE, has contributed an audio component to the Design Doha installation using material drawn from her personal archive. As Noura Al Sayeh Holtrop observes, the collaboration reflects the oral transmission of knowledge that remains central to Arab culture. The resulting soundscape adds another layer to the installation, bringing traces of the past into dialogue with the present.
