95for years and it was just waiting for me to express
it,” he says. Two years later—on the day before his
daughter, now 11, was born—eL Seed quit his day
job to dedicate himself to art full time.
Beginning in 2013, eL Seed took up a one-year
residency at Dubai’s Tashkeel contemporary art
and design center at the invitation of founder
and director Sheikha Lateefa bint Maktoum bin
Rashid Al Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s rul-
ing family. It was apparent he would “make work
with an impact,” says Sheikha Lateefa.
Key to eL Seed’s approach, says Sheikha La-
teefa, is his thoughtfulness regarding the commu-
nities in which he’s working. “He is the inventor
of the idea, but then uses communities to actu-
ally think through what he is making and how it is
produced.” Indeed, eL Seed says he understands,
when making large-scale public art projects, it’s es-
sential to get into the mindset that you’re working
for those who live there, rather than creating what-
ever you’d like. “You give this feeling of ownership
to people, and that’s what I love,” he says.THE DUBAI-BASED ARTIST EL SEED, WHO DRAWS
upon Arabic calligraphy’s looping and curved
shapes to create mesmerizing and often massive
installations of wood, metal, glass, and more, be-
lieves words are powerful—and that’s why he in-
corporates them into his work. One of his most
recent works, for example, took the form of a
giant colorful installation of painted fabric across
the rooftops of the Nepali village of Giranchaur,
which was leveled by an earthquake back in 2015
and rebuilt mostly by local women. “There is
nothing between us, nothing at all,” read the Ara-
bic script on the piece, which quoted Nepali poet
and activist Yogmaya Neupane. “Your eyes have
tears, just like my own.”
Seven years after opening his Dubai studio,
eL Seed, whose projects have appeared every-
where from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the
Korean demilitarized zone, is at the forefront of
that city’s vibrant and growing arts community.
“What I like about this place is the diversity, and
seeing people from dif erent communities, ethnic-
ities, and religions being able to practice and live
on their own terms, but in respect of everybody
else,” he says. His public works can be spotted
throughout the city; what he considers his most
iconic piece in Dubai, Declaration, is a bright pink
sculpture outside the Dubai Opera ripe for public
engagement. “I invite people to climb on the struc-
ture, to walk through it, under it,” says the artist.
Born 40 years ago in France to Tunisian par-
ents, eL Seed—a pseudonym referencing the
17th century French tragicomedy Le Cid, it-
self based on an Arabic word, sayyid, meaning
master—painted his i rst wall in a Parisian sub-
urb as a teenager in 1998. “A woman saw me
from a balcony and was screaming like crazy say-
ing, ‘I’m gonna call your mum right now!’ I was
looking at her like, What’s wrong?” he says. “The
wall is gray, I bought the paint, I painted an art
piece on the wall, I’m making the neighborhood
more beautiful.”
HIS PROFESSIONAL ART CAREER didn’t begin
until a decade later when, while working as a busi-
ness consultant in Montreal, he painted his i rst
piece of Arabic calligraphy as public art. “I felt
something was missing from my life. I was dying
inside, and I just wanted to paint,” he says. “I had
this impression that something had been in me
ART
The artist eL Seed
takes calligraphy
to the streets
BY NICOLA CHILTON
△
Artist eL Seed in
his Dubai studio
on Feb. 17