Jumairy

Biography:

Emirati artist, Jumairy, uses experimentations with sound, film, digital technologies, and performance to create immersive worlds composed of sensory experiences. Perceived as traces and allusions more than closed, finite productions, these experiences occupy and transform spaces, becoming provocations that usher viewers from the present time and place into imagined realms.

These experiences reveal and populate Jumairy’s practice, an evolving and expansive discipline mapped through performative acts, scientific experiments, and mysterious rituals, which take place on a variety of platforms such as on stage, across the big screen, and within smartphone apps.

The same prismatic approach structures his music, in which Arabic electro-pop is entwined with the discordant soundscape of industrial music. Through this progressive and expansive mapping, a comprehensive conduit evolves through which the artist explores psychological questions and processes trauma, both personal and collective.

Artwork Overview:

Echo stems from a place the artist returns to repeatedly; a space shaped by water, by night, and by the quiet parts of oneself that only speak when everything else is still. The place where his shadow lives.

Inspired by the writings of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Jumairy proposes an interactive installation inviting viewers to view their mirrored shadow selves: their repressed emotions, instincts, unconscious forgotten selves.

Jumairy’s foray into shadows began with his light and sound installation Luciferin Shores, in which he traced artificial bioluminescence across the beach of Lulu Island, Abu Dhabi, chasing a memory from childhood. And more recently, with Qumeirah, where he deconstructed the moon and carried its fragments through downtown Dubai in a nightly ritual before placing them in water, sealing a relationship between light and sea, between present and future identity.

These works helped him return to the waters of his childhood: Jumeirah’s beaches, where the moon’s pull first spoke to him. This is the intention of Echo: not a reflection, but a space where something unfamiliar rises; a presence, a memory, a feeling.

The title of the installation references the cursed nymph Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a story that continues to haunt the artist. Echo, whose voice could only repeat, longed for Narcissus. Her absence in his gaze. Her desire, cloaked and unheard, trapped in a loop. Until she became his shadow.

That same echo lingers here. In the water, where the shadows are soft, shifting, glowing. This is not a mirror. It’s a presence. A question. A hum. Reflecting your shadow self.