My admiration for Khalid Jauffer started with During Work Hours — a series of cyanotypes he made during lunch breaks, exposed under the sun outside his office building. The honesty of this work just clicked with me immediately.

Khalid is, at heart, a collector of traces. He draws receipts, forges signatures, photographs ATM slips left behind by strangers, and turns complaint emails into ceramic slabs. He is someone who believes that the small things people leave behind — notes, receipts, parking tickets from machines that no longer exist — reveal how we move through the world and make meaning within it.

His practice started, as he puts it himself, with an angry teenage boy and ended with a sad man. But somewhere between those two points, something remarkable happened: he learned to be honest with himself, with his work, and with anyone willing to look closely enough.

— Khalid, how did your journey in art begin?

— I think my journey officially began when I started working around Alserkal. At the time, they were looking for volunteers, and I remember thinking, "This is my way into that world."

From there, people noticed that I was good with my hands, which led to internships, assistant roles, and occasional jobs with artists and galleries. I was often asked to help with sculpture production even though I'd never made a sculpture in my life. I learned quickly, and each new project became an opportunity to acquire a new set of skills.

My practice mostly developed through working with other artists. I realised that if I wanted to learn, the only way I could learn was by being in proximity to artists, whether as a technician or as an assistant.

It was also a way for me to experiment with forms of art-making that I wouldn't normally pursue myself. If someone was making wax sculptures, at least I learned how to make them, despite never wanting to do so in my own practice.

After being an assistant, I became a technician at Art Jameel for a long time, since they first opened. That is where I met many of the artists who became my mentors and guided me.

Then, for the last two years, I worked as a curatorial assistant at Sharjah Art Foundation.

Through all these different roles, I pieced together what it means to be an artist and how to think like one by working among artists.

Everything in my practice is a riff on someone else. That is kind of how it is built. There is no original thought in the sense that it is all influenced by different people, and those influences come together.

I think my own art-making really took off after I started doing SEAF (Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship). After this, people began to see me as an artist.

The first time someone recognised me as an artist actually happened in 2017 by chance. I applied for an open call exhibition through Yorkshire Sculpture Park. That was the first time my work ever went anywhere.

— And in 2018, you took part in Losers Club at Grey Noise. What work did you show there?

— Losers Club was conceived during the summer, when things were relatively quiet. The idea was to activate the gallery and turn it into a space that could transform or host different kinds of interventions.

The work I showed was actually quite silly, haha! It was an image of Kim Kardashian on tracing paper from one of her visits to Dubai, with the word "Marhaba" written alongside it.

It came from a very confused period in my life. I was trying to make political or social critiques and using public figures as proxies for larger ideas. Looking back, my practice definitely began as that of an angry teenage boy trying to articulate some form of criticism. Over time, that anger started to feel less useful to me. I sometimes joke that my practice started with an angry teenage boy and ended with a sad man.

— And where does the current sadness come from?

— I think it comes from growing up as an expat. There is a particular feeling that comes with that experience. It is shaped by a lot of joy and opportunity, but there is also an awareness that your relationship to a place can be complicated.

A lot of my work comes from that feeling of being both inside and outside at the same time. You can feel deeply connected to a place and still be aware that your experience of it is different. That tension has probably shaped the way I see cities, relationships, and the world around me.

As I got older, I realised that what I was really looking for was stability. Growing up, life often felt uncertain, so I was always drawn to the idea of having something more predictable. But even when things become stable, there is still a part of you that keeps negotiating those earlier experiences.

Moving to London made me realise how specific my upbringing was and how much it continues to shape my perspective. It also made me pay closer attention to the small things people leave behind — notes, receipts, signs, and other everyday traces. I am interested in them because they reveal how people move through a city and make meaning within it.

I think that is what many of my works are ultimately about: trying to understand belonging through the ordinary things that surround us.

— Would you say you have found stability now?

— I think that after some therapy, my relationship to stability has changed. If you grow up in precarious circumstances, adaptability becomes second nature. You are always adjusting, always responding.

Lately, I have been trying to understand what stability actually means for me. For a long time, I thought I knew. I had a secure job, there was no particular reason to leave, and yet I decided to do a master's degree because I received a scholarship. Choosing to disrupt your life like that raises difficult questions.

When I went back to Sharjah in December, I seriously considered returning after finishing my degree. I found myself thinking very practically: I could get a job, buy a car, maybe even buy a house. At first, it felt like I needed to catch up with everyone around me. My friends seemed settled, while I felt like I was still figuring things out.

Then I started asking myself a different question: if I actually got all those things, what would my life look like? I realised that what I wanted wasn't necessarily that version of stability.

It made me wonder whether some of my decisions were coming from desire or from anxiety. If you grow up without much stability, it is natural to want to create it for yourself. But do I actually want that life, or am I responding to old fears? Those are the questions I am thinking about now.

— Was there any reason you went to therapy?

— 2021 was a difficult year for me. Looking back, I didn't realise how much of my upbringing and responsibilities had built up inside me or how much they were shaping the way I moved through the world.

It was a period that made me realise I needed help. Since then, therapy has changed the way I look at life and, inevitably, the way I think about my practice.

When I was younger, I knew why certain things interested me and why they might be interesting to an art audience. What I didn't understand was why they mattered to me.

Therapy has helped me understand that. It informs my practice in a very direct way. The honesty and self-reflection that come with it are not things I am ashamed of anymore.

That is why, even on my website, I try to write very plainly. I don't want the work to pretend to be something grander than it is. I would rather be honest about what it comes from and what it is trying to do.

When I was younger, there was probably a certain romanticisation of being an artist. Now I am more interested in maintaining an honest relationship with the work and with myself.

— Now, let’s speak about a few of your artworks. I'd like to ask about School, the series you made in 2019. Could you tell me more about that work? There is a drawing and a voucher — how did those elements come together?

— That was one of the first residency programs I took part in: Campus Art Dubai. At the time, I was dealing with a lot of imposter syndrome. The program gave us these strange studios in Dubai Design District. They weren't really finished spaces — just dust, cement, exposed wires.

It was nice to have a place to work, but it also meant I was sitting in this dungeon-like space, bored and not producing anything. I didn't even know what I wanted to make.

Downstairs, there was a shop called Art Hub. It is a commercial place where you can pay 200 dirhams to learn oil painting. I thought the program had given me a production budget, and I am not making anything, so maybe I can use it to learn a new skill.

I went in and met a guy named Valentin. He asked what I wanted to paint. One of the works in the exhibition comes from that experience. It is an image of someone holding a photo of someone holding a falcon. The original image comes from my time working as a technician at Jameel Arts Centre. It's a photo by Farah Al Qasimi that I am holding in the picture.

She is an incredible image-maker, and I wanted to double the image somehow, but through my own narrative — adding my own hands and labour into it.

I'd always thought I was good at drawing. So I sketched the image onto the canvas, and Valentin came over and told me I was terrible at drawing. He said all my proportions were wrong. I thought he was joking, but he insisted I start again.

The class was only two hours long. Within the first half hour, I'd completed the drawing, but he kept telling me it wasn't right. I spent another hour trying to get his attention while he largely ignored me. Finally, with only about twenty minutes left, I ended up painting just the edges of the photograph.

Then he said, "If you want to finish the painting, pay another 200 dirhams and come back." A moment later, he added, "Actually, this could be a really good artwork. If you pay 300 dirhams, we can include it in an exhibition here."

At that point, I realised the entire conversation was the work. The painting might eventually go somewhere; it might even sell, but what interested me was this doubling that was taking place. It mirrored the realities of art production itself.

Next to the painting, there is also a hand-drawn version of the receipt from that class. Everything is drawn by hand.

The critique was fairly simple: within those same two hours, I made both the painting and the receipt. The work became a way of thinking about labour, value, and what can actually be produced within a fixed amount of time.

— There is also a work During Work Hours, which I admire. You made it while working at Sharjah Art Foundation, is that right?

— During Work Hours emerged from a very specific moment in my life. I had just joined Warehouse421's artist development program and, shortly afterwards, started a full-time job. For the first time, I was balancing institutional work with my own practice.

Most of my earlier works came from wandering around, finding things, and responding to them. Suddenly, I was working full-time and no longer had the time or headspace for that. So I began asking myself what I could make with the resources immediately around me.

At work, I spent my days writing and editing texts. Around the same time, I was journaling regularly and became interested in writing as a form of artistic practice. I started composing short, confessional texts based on thoughts or observations that emerged throughout the workday.

Each cyanotype became a simple record of a moment: a thought, a feeling, or something I had noticed on my way to work. The process itself was tied to the rhythms of the office. I would prepare the work in the morning and expose it during my lunch break, using the sun outside the building. In that sense, the work literally measured time spent away from the office.

Looking back, it was one of the most direct works I have made. I never came from a studio-based practice, so using the office as a studio felt completely natural.

— I also came across the story behind the work with the lost suitcase. It felt quite tragic to read! Could you tell me more about that experience and how it became a work?

— When I was making that show, I was thinking a lot about how people perceived my work. At that point, I was mostly known for making work about Dubai, and I had started to feel a bit suffocated by that label. I wanted to think from a more personal place and ask what experiences from my own life could become work.

Around that time, Alserkal sent me to work at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. It was the first time I had lived outside the UAE, and everything I owned fit into a single suitcase. When you leave home for the first time, a suitcase feels like a condensed version of yourself. It contains everything you have decided is essential.

One weekend, I travelled to the south of France to visit a friend. On the way back, I got off a bus during a stop and ended up missing it. My suitcase disappeared with it.

What stayed with me wasn't the inconvenience but the realisation that the suitcase contained a version of myself. There was a laptop a friend had given me, running clothes, a custom jersey—objects that carried memories, relationships, and personal histories. When the suitcase disappeared, all of those things disappeared with it.

The experience made me think about how objects participate in the construction of the self. For the exhibition, I became interested in the idea of replacement: if I bought every object again, would I get that version of myself back?

The answer was no.

The objects could be replaced, but whatever they represented could not. That version of the self continues to exist somewhere else, almost like a floating marker moving beyond your reach.

— And what about your work, Return the Slab?

— This was during COVID, when I was making a lot of ceramics and trying to figure out what work could be. I was broke, unemployed, recently out of a relationship, and generally in a bad place.

To make myself feel better, I bought a bag online. It was the last one on sale, and when it arrived, it was completely wrong. Not just the wrong model—the wrong brand. Even stranger, the label attached to it was the label of the bag I had actually ordered.

I emailed the company, explaining the mistake. Their response was essentially that I was the one who had made it.

Around the same time, I had seen The Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣi at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, often described as the world's oldest customer complaint. I realised I was having the same experience as someone who had lived thousands of years ago: we were both writing complaints about products we had received.

That became the starting point for the work. I made a ceramic slab engraved with the email correspondence and exhibited it alongside the shipping documents and return receipts.

What made the whole thing funny was how personally I took it. Every email felt like a new insult. At one point, I remember thinking, "You don't know my life. I'm already at the lowest point of my life, and now you're kicking me while I'm down."

Then the work travelled to an exhibition in Saudi Arabia and broke in half during shipping.

At that point, I became convinced the work was cursed.

What began as a complaint email turned into an object that kept accumulating its own misfortunes. The complaint became an artwork, the artwork became a condition report, and the story continued. Now I think of it as a work that moves through the world collecting new complaints wherever it goes.

— You are obviously a fan of receipts. What interests you about them?

— As a kid, I was always good at drawing. My introduction to it was very straightforward: a teacher would put an image in front of you and tell you to copy it. From the beginning, drawing was about observation, repetition, and imitation rather than inventing original images.

I was also surprisingly good at forging signatures. Looking back, I think that experience stayed with me. It created a curiosity about imitation — the idea that if you spend enough time with something, you can reproduce it or even inhabit it.

I have always been quite nosy. When I lived in Dubai, I would collect ATM receipts people had left behind just to see who was the richest. What interested me were the systems behind everyday life and the traces people accidentally leave behind.

Sometimes a receipt would contain a detail that felt funny, personal, or strangely meaningful. Those were usually the ones I wanted to draw. I was also interested in how these documents become remnants of things that disappear. I used to collect Dubai Mall parking receipts, for example, from machines that no longer exist.

My favourite receipt came from a machine that malfunctioned and printed nothing but black-and-white lines. I drew it and framed the drawing alongside the original receipt. Underneath, I wrote: "The man and the machine — both are failures."

— What are you working on now?

— I am preparing the work for my degree show, so I don't want to reveal too much yet. What I can say is that the work I am making now feels both very different and not different at all.

As someone who didn't go to art school, a lot of the work I made in the past was trying to look like art. It looked like the artists I admired and the ways I had learned to understand contemporary art. What I am trying to do now is figure out how to make the work look more like me.