Special Event

The Public Studio is a creative day of open, drop-in making at 421. Four stations will be set up facilitated by four experienced practitioners. Move between stations at your own pace, try something new, and leave with something you make with your own hands.

Station 1: Tile Painting with Parneet Pahwa Parneet invites participants to paint on her pre-fired clay tiles, exploring color and mark-making to develop their own motifs and visual language. Participants leave with a painted tile of their own.

Station 2: Petal Fold Zine-Making with Arnold Barnetto Arnold guides participants through the petal fold, a zine-making technique that opens and blooms like a flower. After a walkthrough of the folding and scoring technique, participants take full creative ownership, moving between a collage station stocked with found materials and printed ephemera and a letter stamping station to compose a zine of their own.

Station 3: Roll the Rule with Nagham Hammoush An open printmaking station where participants select from an array of pre-carved linocut stamps drawn from Mesopotamian motifs, designed by Nagham Hamoush. Participants roll and press their chosen stamps onto any object they like, whether paper, tote bags, t-shirts, or anything else they want to upcycle. Each stamp comes with a postcard detailing its origin and cultural context, so participants leave with both a printed object and a fragment of living history.

Station 4: Creative Survival Kit with The Memo Club Together with Sumayya, Zoe, and Nada from The Memo Club, participants assemble their own Creative Survival Kit, a personal, portable collection of analog tools and materials designed to support a more grounded, creative everyday life. The session activates each element through a series of short, playful exercises moving between writing, stamp-making, scrapbooking, and postcard-making.

Participants leave with at least one handmade object and an experience of art-making as something slow, accessible, and genuinely open to all.

Accessibility & Participation

Open to all ages. 

No prior experience required.

About the Instructors

Parneet Pahwa is an Indian ceramic artist and interdisciplinary maker whose practice explores storytelling, material memory, and the relationships between people, place, and everyday ritual. Working primarily through clay while extending into installation, weaving, printmaking, and material experimentation, she is interested in how materials can hold traces of lived experience and become vessels for shared narratives.

Her work often begins with personal encounters, conversations, and observations, drawing inspiration from family histories, food traditions, craft practices, migration, labour, and collective memory. Through both functional and sculptural forms, she would like to investigate how objects become markers of connection—holding stories of belonging, absence, celebration, and exchange. Whether creating intimate tableware or larger installations, her practice seeks to reveal the social and emotional significance embedded within everyday materials and acts of making.

At the heart of her work is a curiosity for process and material dialogue. Clay becomes a means of research, allowing her to explore themes of cultural preservation, environmental change, and human relationships through making. By combining traditional craft techniques with contemporary approaches, she creates work that invites reflection, conversation, and a deeper awareness of the connections that shape our shared experiences.

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Arnold Barretto (born 1996, India) is an analog photographer, designer, printmaker, and book artist.  He received his BFA in Studio Arts from SUNY Plattsburgh, NY, USA in 2019 with an emphasis on Photography and Graphic Design. Following that he moved to NYC where he spent a few months in the Aperture Foundation’s Work Scholar Program working in the Production Department that helps realize the company's Photobooks and Annual Photo Magazines. He then moved back to the UAE (where he spent most of his early life) and now works and teaches for Gulf Photo Plus. 

Working primarily with analog processes, Barretto emphasizes the tactile nature of image-making and the quiet intimacy of printed matter. His work explores themes of identity, space, desire, with an emphasis on that which is personal especially when existing in a space that does not allow for this exploration. wHis approach is also rooted in the physicality of materials, inviting slower, more contemplative engagement. 

He has participated in group exhibitions across the United States and the UAE. In 2023, he was selected as a fellow of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF), a prestigious 10-month program for emerging UAE-based artists, conducted in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently in cohort 5 of the Teaching Artist Fellowship at Manarat Al Sadiyat in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

He has self-published two artist books. Glimpses (2024) is a limited edition of 75 hand-bound, riso-printed zines featuring original cyanotype portraits of men. Jesus Will Save You (2025) is a personal and palpable exploration of the self in relation to home, religion, and family. Housed in a cassette holder, this accordion book unfolds two parallel narratives running on opposite sides, each with its own distinct interplay of photography and poetic text.

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Nagham Hammoush is a Syrian-German multidisciplinary artist and educator. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Damascus (2013) and an MA in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts (2022). Her practice focuses on participatory and interactive art, engaging with themes of identity, belonging, and gender, alongside her work in art education and cultural mediation. She explores the role of printmaking within contemporary art through its integration into performance and installation practices, investigating repetition and reproduction as tools that reflect memory, the rhythm of the body, and lived experience.

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The Memo Club is a collective founded by three emerging artists based in Abu Dhabi, whose work revolves around memory, identity, and community-building. The memo club is a community initiative, bringing people together to reconnect with tactile experiences, starting with print. The memo club was born out of this need: a space for adults to come together, when the 9-to-5 can feel all-consuming, when the expectations of life can leave little to no room for artistic practice. We wanted to create something for friends, and friends of friends, to gather towards something that could look like reclaiming time, thought, and materials.

Sumayya Sideek (b.1996, Colombo) is a Communications Coordinator at 421 Arts Campus. She is a UAE-based creative with a background in Media Studies. She has experience spanning various industries within the field of communications for organisations globally. Her work focuses primarily on documentation and storytelling in the narratives of impact-driven projects surrounding community, art, and social advocacy. Sumayya also works with MENASA-based designers and artists in their communications and archival processes. In the past, she has also performed as a spoken-word poet in the UAE.

Zoe Cusi (b. 1997, Abu Dhabi) is a Filipino multidisciplinary artist living and working in Abu Dhabi. Her artistic practice explores the idea of connection - what it means to build, lose, and form something inherently and deeply human; Though most may argue that the definition of ‘connection’ is broad or vague, Zoe believes that is where its beauty lies. It has the ability to shape-shift, mould, and adapt to a world of narratives and perspectives, whether by force or choice. A storyteller by both trade and virtue, Zoe uses paint, poetry, paper, clay, photography, and oral history to tell stories of her lived experiences. Zoe is a recipient of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (2025) and holds a Bachelor of Communications in Public Relations and Journalism.

Nada Almosa (b. 1999) is an Abu Dhabi-based Palestinian artist and creative writer. Her practice navigates memory, identity-making, and play through mixed media, photography, and creative writing. Her works draw inspiration from her Palestinian heritage as well as the desire to preserve memory and chronicle stories of diaspora. She is a graduate of Literature & Creative Writing from New York University Abu Dhabi (2021). Nada has participated in the VICE residency by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company (2022), a mentorship program with Nujoom Al Ghanem (2023), and the Spectrum: Photographers in Residence program at Manarat Al Saadiyat (2024). She is participating in the Fall cohort of the Teaching Artist Fellowship at Manarat Al Saadiyat this year. She has published works in Corniche, Mizna, Strange Horizons, and Wasafiri magazine.