Juma Al Haj, Iris Projects: Born in 1990, Sharjah native Juma Al Haj creates abstract paintings derived from the spiritual resonance of ancient religious texts, historical references, and his personal diaries. Driven by an early fascination with words—not only for what they mean, but for the way they curve and collide across a page—he dissolves grammatical structures to leave only the conceptualization of the words they symbolize.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in visual communication in 2012 from the American University of Sharjah and a master’s in international relations in 2020 from the University of Wollongong in Dubai, and it was during the Covid-19 pandemic that he began sharing paintings on social media, bringing what was previously a private practice into public view.
Moving between the intimacy of handwriting and the freedom of abstract gesture, Al Haj transforms written expression into an open field of form, paying homage to Arabic calligraphy while probing interiority, identity, and belonging. At “Déjà Vu,” he presented his latest series, Silence in repetition (2026), in which dense, looping brushwork reflects the quiet power of persistence and repetition.