Moza Almatrooshi

b. 1991, Dubai, UAE, lives in the UAE.

Moza Almatrooshi  is a multimedia conceptual artist based in Sharjah whose practice looks at narratives from ancient and contemporary mythologies in the Arabian Peninsula, and the ways in which they uphold nation building techniques. This culminates in fictions and metaphors derived from regional food production practices and food politics.

In Almatrooshi’s new body of work, The Agriculture School, she positions farmers and foragers as the primary source of knowledge and invites them to set off to various mountainous regions to engage with each other and the land. As part of their exchange, participants collected pictorial material, while addressing their successes and challenges in their field of work. Their engagement resulted in a consensus that an active archive of images, seeds, earth matter, and knowledge needs to be accessible to them and others. In this iteration of Matrooshi’s project, she underlines the theme of trans-generational knowledge by presenting the images of honey forager Maktoom Alshehhi. Maktoom collects honey from wild bees in methods passed down to him through his ancestors. The natural matter on display consists of rocks that are arranged together in small cove formations to encourage the wild bees to build their nests inside.

Almatrooshi earned an MFA from the United Kingdom's Slade School of Fine Art in 2019 and a diploma in culinary arts from ICCA Dubai in 2020. Her artworks were performed in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, selected by the ICA and BBC for the New Creatives project, and displayed in the second Lahore Biennale. Her most recent participations include On Foraging at Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi, 2022 and ADMAF's Portrait of a Nation II: Beyond Narratives, Abu Dhabi, 2022.  Her writings have been published in ArabLit Quarterly and by the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo. She is currently a faculty fellow in the Sheikha Salama Emerging Artists Fellowship in Abu Dhabi, UAE.