Biography
Camelia Mohebi grew up between three countries and three languages — Dubai, Tehran and Geneva — before studying visual communication in London. The trajectory of her practice maps neatly onto that biography: a restlessness between disciplines, a refusal to stay in one register, and a persistent return to the same question, which is something between what does healing look like and what does it feel like to be seen. She started painting professionally after 2002, while simultaneously building a children's brand with three stores across the UAE. In 2015, when her father was ill, something shifted. She turned toward healing modalities — Neuro Linguistic Programming, Theta Healing, quantum healing — not as alternatives to art but as extensions of it. Sound frequencies, sacred geometry, the subconscious mind: these became materials in the same way that acrylic paint and stainless steel are materials. Her work since has been about making that interior landscape visible. The result is a practice that is genuinely hard to categorise, which is probably the point. She paints on canvas, leather, velvet, wood and musical drums. She works digitally and then prints and paints over the print. She embeds strings into canvases to mark the meeting points of symmetrical compositions inspired by esoteric cosmology. She uses Swarovski crystals to refract light across surfaces. She has described one series as based on the philosophy of seven planes of existence — the sixth plane, specifically, "where all inspiration and mathematics and sacred geometry lies." Mohebi first received national recognition in 2009 through Emirati Expressions in Abu Dhabi, one of the first major showcases of contemporary UAE art. Her solo exhibition Signals at Sotheby's Dubai in 2022 brought her to an international collector audience. A triptych from her Diffusion series is in the permanent collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah. In 2023 she founded The Sima Collective, a platform supporting emerging artists through residencies, workshops and exhibitions. She has shown in New York, London, Milan, Hong Kong and across the UAE.
