Talin Hazbar on Landscape, Material, and Collaboration

Dubai-based artist Talin Hazbar explores how landscapes change, move, and transform by merging disciplines including architecture, archaeology, and environmental science. Her practice focuses on redefining moulds and exploring malleable systems, particularly through granular materials like sand. In Earth Readings (2022), created during a residency in AlUla, she used 1,360 handmade adobe mud bricks to form two parallel walls within a palm grove, embedding personal stories gathered from the local community to map relationships between past and present. Hazbar's interest in marine matter began in 2016, leading to collaborations with fishermen in Sharjah and the artwork Accumulations. In 2019, she was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for the NGV Triennial 2020, producing Accretions. She also works with the Dubai Voluntary Diving team, led by Captain Abdulla Muhsen, to lift waste from the ocean and reimagine it as building material in the project Sediments. Hazbar emphasizes collaboration and questions of conscious production, indigenous knowledge, and ecological consequences.