|

UAE National Day

  • In this mixed-media work, Mehrdad Fallah presents a contemporary visual narrative of the UAE’s national identity through an eloquent interplay of color, texture, composition, and symbolic form. The presence of gold—applied with genuine gold leaf—emerges like a sacred radiance against the textured background, a luminosity that unmistakably conveys notions of grandeur, prosperity, and flourishing. It reflects today’s UAE as a young yet powerful and internationally recognized nation.

  • Roshanak Sattari’s painting Awakened Time positions itself, both conceptually and structurally, in a dialogue between Modernism and Postmodernism—where the city is no longer a purely physical landscape but a geography of memory and collective consciousness. The symbolism of the clock and the watchful eyes continues the historical tradition of using emblems of power, time, and surveillance. Meanwhile, the modern architecture and nocturnal execution align the work with contemporary urban painting, while the use of artificial light and atmospheric reflections connects it to the light-based art of the past century.

  • The fusion of the Abu Dhabi mosque (tradition) with the towers (modernity) re-creates a visual discourse of Emirati identity—an identity rising from the earth and reaching toward the sky. Beita Vakili’s painting, housed in the Raha Gallery Middle East Collection, illustrates that today’s UAE is the result of the coexistence of tradition and technology, faith and development, Islamic architecture and global innovation—a nation looking toward the future while never forgetting its roots. Beyond its artistic function and chromatic cohesion, the use of the UAE flag’s colors itself operates as a statement of national identity.