Biography
Born in 1993 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where he spent most of his early years. Hashem Alsharif is a multidisciplinary Saudi Artist with a focus on analogue photography and traditional printing methods. From a young age, he grew up in a highly diverse environment that provided him with an exposure to a unique mix of the busy city life alongside the openness of the desert that will help shape his style moving forward. During his childhood, his family gathered frequently to review photo albums, a tradition that imprinted his first impressions of storytelling through pictorial mediums and solidified his sense of visual importance.
He started photographing at a young age using a digital camera, but it was not until he traveled to the United States in 2011 to pursue a degree in Mechanical Engineering at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH when his love for photography started taking shape. In 2014, he got his first film camera and started to sharpen his photographic skills. In the same year, he joined a student project team called Buckeye Current, where he helped develop an electric motorcycle to join international racing competitions. During that time, he gained an immense amount of experience in design and manufacturing, working with materials ranging from wood to aerospace grade aluminum and steel. While studying abroad, he was introduced to the western culture in a very direct way; from engineering and design as a field of study to social aspects and arts. This was a focal point during his personal development and artistic maturity.
After coming back to Saudi in 2017, He worked as an engineer for two years before going back to the Bay Area in the United States in 2019 for a six month training program at the electric vehicle manufacturing Lucid Motors. It was during that time that he indulged in analogue photography as a main medium due to the importance he felt to document life through visual messages to tell his stories.
He continued his self taught journey by learning the technicalities of film processing and scanning until he started assembling his own darkroom in Saudi Arabia at the beginning of 2021. Hashem continued his practice by learning traditional darkroom printing and was fascinated by the power of monotonic pictures and its ability to showcase the pictures within his stories in completely new ways.
He moved to Riyadh at the beginning of 2022 to expand his exposure to arts and culture, and continued to take photographs of places, interactions, and the people he met. Drawing influence of mid 20th century photographers for inspiration in portraiture and documentary. In 2023, he started a residency at the Misk Arts Institute for silkscreen printing for photographers, where he showcased his debut photographic project titled “Khubaiti”, highlighting a traditional energetic Saudi folklore with a focus on its movement and rhythm. This was a continuation to his previous exploration to semi-nomadic practices like falconry and desert camping.
Throughout his journey, he has adopted different art practices from storywriting, to doodling and from traditional printing to alternative processes. This helped create a moldable presenting style that he uses to communicate his thoughts and to document his observations. He tries to provide a closer look into his community and its rich heritage and intellectual ideas through his work. He emphasizes within his work the ideas of time passing and memory relations to the shaping of the human consciousness.