A week ago, Tashkeel announced the opening of Precarious Beings, the debut solo exhibition by Kuwaiti artist and architect Hamad Al Muzaini. On view until October 11, it tells the story of his home country, Kuwait — but don't expect a sweeping exploration of the city. Instead, it focuses on the small, easily overlooked things you usually walk straight past.

So, how did Precarious Beings come about? What do these seemingly ordinary objects have to do with Kuwait? And which ones demand a little more attention to fully understand?

We went through the exhibition with Hamad himself to find out.

If we refer to the exhibition description, we will see that the concept of Precarious Beings is built around observation and the nature of placemaking in Kuwait City. Sounds a little intimidating? No worries — let me explain.

Hamad spent years away from Kuwait, studying architecture at the University of Southern California and later completing a Master's in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University. Then, in 2021, he returned home. Back in Kuwait City, he started taking long walks, paying closer attention to the ordinary things most of us walk straight past — things that feel like they don't really belong anywhere in particular, extras tacked onto the place rather than part of it: trash bins, bollards along the pavement, cleaning schedules posted in public restrooms and even window-washing scrapers.

But what caught his attention most were the moments when these everyday systems stopped working as intended. A bollard might be ripped out of the ground after an accident. A bin designed to hang from a pole might break off and end up resting beside it. A forgotten glove might remain on the pavement.

When the opportunity to develop the project through Tashkeel's Critical Practice Programme came along, those observations slowly grew into Precarious Beings. Rather than simply documenting what he saw, Hamad began turning these fleeting moments into something an audience could stumble upon for themselves.

And that sense of discovery is exactly what makes the exhibition tick. Walk into the gallery and you will find small ceramic pieces scattered across the walls, flashes of colour competing for your attention, and works popping up in places you would least expect. You have to actually hunt for them — much like Hamad had to learn to hunt for meaning in the city itself.

So where does 1951 come into all of this? It was a turning point in the making of modern Kuwait City — and the starting point for many of the urban systems Hamad is looking at today.

In 1951, as oil revenues were rapidly transforming the country, Kuwait commissioned its first master plan for the modern city. Kuwait City began changing at extraordinary speed: new roads and highways appeared, the city was divided into functional zones, and public space started being organised according to a new planning logic. But alongside these big changes came smaller ones. New roads needed streetlights, curbs, road markings, bollards and countless other pieces of infrastructure — many of the same objects Hamad photographs and studies today.

That is the contrast at the heart of his work: the city as it was planned versus the city as it actually became. Because ultimately, no city stays exactly as it was designed — the people living in it inevitably reshape it.

So, Hamad spots something in the city — a broken bollard, an oddly placed bin, a detail most of us would walk straight past. What happens to it next? And how does it go from a quick observation to something hanging on a gallery wall?

For Hamad, it can take several forms: a photograph, a sketch, a graphite drawing or a sculpture. And the choice isn't random. Each lets him do something different with what he originally saw.

1. Photography — the fastest

You walk through the city, something catches your eye, and you photograph it — often before you quite understand why it matters. Hamad describes photography as his “no-excuses” medium: there is no need to know what you want to say or what the image might eventually become. First, you simply capture the observation.

2. The sketchbook — where the digging begins

Later, when Hamad returns to those photographs, patterns start to emerge: similar objects, recurring pieces of infrastructure or particular behaviours. That is when the research begins. He draws, writes, looks things up and lets one detail lead to another.

So how does that work in practice? Take an ordinary window squeegee. It might lead him to a 1930s Ettore patent, then to an imagined “anti-squeegee”, and eventually to a comparison between its movement and the lines raked into a Japanese rock garden. There is no fixed destination — the point is simply to see where the original observation leads.

3. Drawing — where everything slows down

Not every sketch stays in the sketchbook. Some begin to stand out, and from there, Hamad develops them into finished graphite drawings.

The shift changes the way he looks at the original observation. What was captured in a second on the street is now deliberately slowed down and built up layer by layer. The surrounding context disappears, leaving an ordinary object or scene to hold your attention on its own.

4. Sculpture — when the object itself changes

And then comes sculpture. Imagine a street kerb: heavy, solid and fixed to the ground. Now imagine the same kerb made from an extremely light material and hanging on a gallery wall.

This is where Hamad starts playing with what we think we know about familiar objects. He changes their material, weight or colour, but leaves just enough for us to recognise them. The question is simple: if something looks exactly like an object we know, do we still expect it to behave like one?

The concept behind a solo exhibition matters, sure — the big idea, the grand narrative, all that. But here is what I have learned from years of wandering galleries: once you are actually standing in the room, the overarching concept is rarely what you are desperate to know.

What you really want is the gossip behind the small stuff — why that object, why there, why does it matter at all? So we went straight to Hamad for the answers.

— You organise the works into three groups: Subjects, Situations and Simulations. What changes as we move from one to the next?

— Subjects looks at pieces of infrastructure that are no longer behaving quite as intended. Take Trash Receptacle as an example: these bins were designed to hang from poles in a car park, but some have broken off. One might be leaning against the pole, another sitting on the ground with its top detached. What interests me is that someone still has to keep putting that loose bin back against the pole. The original system has failed, but a new behaviour has appeared around it.

Situations takes observations from the city and removes their context. Situation #7, for example, comes from a row of bollards near my home in Kuwait. They are no longer fixed into the concrete, but they have remained there for years. I have also seen similar bollards repurposed almost like traffic cones to block driveways. They have lost their original function, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have become useless.

And then Simulations plays with the material, colour and associations of familiar objects. Colored Curbs, for example, looks like something solid and heavy, but it is actually made from toilet paper, joint compound and Elmer’s glue. I am interested in whether the colour and form of an object can make us perceive weight even when the object itself is extremely light.

— Which work in the exhibition might look the simplest at first, but actually needs the most context to understand?

— Styrofoam Cup and Tea Bag. They might seem very simple at first, but they allude to someone I have interacted with for many years — a security guard at a car park I go to every day. The two sculptures refer to his habit of drinking tea.

There are other works connected to him too: Watch, Cigarette, and Wedding Band and The Security Guard. Together, they show how he, and not just the architecture around him, has become part of what gives that place its character.

— Which work in the exhibition feels the most personal and vulnerable to you — and why?

— I would say they are all equally personal and vulnerable, but two come to mind for different reasons.

Electrical Box was the first work I developed, and it eventually branched into four other works in the Subjects series. It was only after making it that I realised how much of my architectural background had found its way into it. I have worked extensively with prefabricated and modular construction, and suddenly I could see those experiences resurfacing in the way I had reinterpreted something so ordinary.

Situation #2 is personal for a completely different reason. It actually began with an observation made by a close friend: he was at a co-op supermarket picking up a coffee when he noticed that the rails normally used for shopping trolleys were blocked by two poles that appeared to have been deliberately bent.

What made that moment special was simply that he thought to contact me and share it. It made me realise that my way of looking at the city had started to rub off on the people close to me.

— Finally, what are visitors responding to most?

— Interestingly, the images in the process room. People first encounter the works in the main gallery, then see photographs of the real objects and situations behind them. That moment of recognition often brings a bit of humour — suddenly, they realise these are things they encounter every day. And that is exactly what I hoped for.