Emirates Man, Lifestyle

Mayed AlMheiri did not set out to be a photographer. But the 21-year-old has built a body of work so distinctive that it has just carried him, and the flag of the UAE, onto one of the most closely watched stages in contemporary art. This summer, his work was on show at LUMA Arles, as part of the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, held alongside Rencontres d’Arles, the influential photography festival that takes over the south of France every year.

AlMheiri’s route into photography was never obvious. He studies multimedia art at University of the Arts Sharjah, a degree built on sculpture, painting and the full breadth of fine art, and had barely picked up a camera with any real seriousness before his professor pulled him aside. “He kept telling me he saw something in me,” AlMheiri remembers. “I thought, let me trust him, let me see what he sees in me.” It worked.

Now in its ninth edition, this year’s competition was chaired by British photographer David Sims, alongside Dior’s Peter Philips and LUMA Arles founder Maja Hoffmann. Among ten laureates chosen from some of the world’s leading art schools, including Central Saint Martins, the Royal College of Art and Tokyo University of the Arts, AlMheiri turned out to be the only artist selected from the UAE, and, by his own account, from the Gulf entirely. “I can’t even begin to tell you how unreal this is,” he says. “It’s such an honour to know I’m carrying that flag to an international level of prestige, where we’re getting recognition from people all over the world.”

His submission, a triptych titled Somatic Anxiety & Not Myself, is built entirely from self-portraits: fragments of his own body set against black, studded with small metal tubes, it’s a continuation of a series he began in 2025. There is no single, legible face anywhere to be found. Instead, there are limbs: isolated, disembodied, reassembled into something closer to a nervous system than a portrait. “It wasn’t something I even considered at first, to be honest,” AlMheiri says of the concept. “A lot of the emotions we feel internally, they surface on the body. When you’re excited, you get shaky hands but also when you’re anxious, you get shaky hands. I felt like the body was a portal to those internal feelings. It was the best way to show that through my work.” The specific parts he chose to isolate are deliberate, too. “I talk about masculinity a lot in my work, and male body image, especially in the Gulf and the UAE,” he explains. “These are body parts I felt should be seen as more masculine. So why aren’t they?” This year’s theme was, fittingly, Face to Face but in a counterintuitive move AlMheiri’s key images do the opposite of what the title suggests. His face never fully appears; where it does, it is blurred, distorted, deliberately withheld. “I know my experiences aren’t just my own. A lot of Emirati people have walked in the same shoes I have. If I’d included my face clearly, it would have made the work too personal and put a wall up between the viewer and the piece. This way, they can look at it and see themselves in it instead.”

AlMheiri had already shown work at Sikka and at Al Jalila Cultural Centre during World Art Dubai, regional platforms he credits with building in him the confidence to stand in front of an international jury. “Your work is being exhibited, and then there’s the viewer, and you’re the portal in between,” he says. “If you’re not there to explain it, or talk for it, people might not understand.” Even so, he found Arles taught him something new: how to speak about his work to viewers who had never encountered anything from the Gulf before. What AlMheiri hopes his work adds to that wider conversation is an Emirati perspective. Something he says is sadly still too rare on the international arts stage. At just 21, and still completing his bachelor’s degree, AlMheiri was the youngest laureate in Arles this year, a fact that briefly rattled him. “Everyone else there was much more experienced than me,” he recalls. “At first I felt so out of my depth, like I didn’t belong there. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized achieving this at a younger age than anyone else there makes me just as strong, just as powerful.” Being named among the laureates has already opened doors: connections with the nine other finalists, exposure to work from across the world, and a growing list of opportunities that is still unfolding. His work so far has been life-sized. “Now,” he says, “I want my work on a building.”

“There’s no such thing as a small opportunity,” he shares. “Never say no to one.” In fact, this one very nearly didn’t happen. When the Dior Award callout first landed in his inbox, his instinct was to scroll past it. “I thought, I won’t get accepted, my work isn’t good enough. But my professor pushed me; he told me he trusted what he saw. And it turned out amazing, because sometimes, the unexpected happens.”

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Images: Supplied