Bashaer Hawsawi: ‘I’m making my own world just to understand it’

DUBAI: “I’m not sure that ‘conceptual art’ is a term I use in my mind,” Saudi artist and designer Bashaer Hawsawi tells Arab News. “(When I began exhibiting) people told me, ‘You’re doing conceptual art.’ And I said, “What do you mean?’ I didn’t know what conceptual art was. I’m just doing what I feel, you know?”

For Hawsawi, that usually means creating works that utilize materials with a personal connection. She has a number of ongoing series — including perhaps her best-known body of work, “Cleansing,” in which she works with brooms and brushes — and says she works on each of them annually “just to improve them.”