Neel Jassani: Creating and Chronicling the Underground

For Neel Jassani, making art is less a profession than a condition, a way of moving through the world with equal measures of precision and irreverence. “I’m an artist that makes things in many forms, shapes, and mediums,” she says. “But I also partake in documenting that process for other people.” It’s this dual instinct that defines both her painting practice and Gunk, the magazine and creative platform she founded to nurture the underground arts community in Dubai.

Trained at the Barcelona Academy of Art, Jassani produces paintings grounded in an exacting sense of composition and light, where geometry becomes a vessel for emotion. Her recent series, The Human Experience, continues this thread. “It’s a collection filled with metaphysical adventures and universal storytelling,” she says. The works examine how the human condition remains fundamentally unchanged through time, using structure and symbolism to probe the unseen layers of consciousness.

Through Gunk, meanwhile, Jassani extends her vision into the collaborative realm. The platform produces films, editorials, and design pieces, often blurring boundaries between art and everyday culture. “It’s a home to the underground creative culture in Dubai,” she explains. “I’m attempting to build a healthy foundation where talented individuals can use it to promote their work and create alongside us. By healthy, I mean pure meritocracy—I don’t highlight people just because they’re friends.”

Under her direction, Gunk has become known for its experimental tone and unexpected intersections ranging from holographic installations at BRED to collaborations that fuse digital media with physical craft. It is both an archive and an experiment, chronicling the creative energy of a generation in motion.

“Inspiration is fleeting,” she says, a typically wry reply when asked about inspiration. “It’s an unreliable partner in this art business—you have to aim for something more concrete, like will.” Her influences range from “bugs up to no good” to her father “as a persona” and “stacks of books”. That blend of the intimate and the infinite, the poetic and the pragmatic, echoes throughout her work.

She is equally candid about ambition. “I hope to make enough moola to drive sociopolitical change in the homeland with things that actually matter,” she says. “The art aspect of things is a medium to drive personal development or cultural change, but what matters is using that momentum to drive change in something useful.”

As for her creative fuel, she credits her husband Zaid’s homemade brews. “I asked him to make me the essence of carrot cake in a cup once,” she laughs. “That coffee manifested itself into existence. That’s my real fuel: morning love in a chalice of beans.”

Looking ahead, Jassani is focused on the third volume of Gunk, launching in February 2026, and hosting workshops for emerging designers. Beyond projects, though, she remains driven by a larger purpose. “I would like to be a reliable frame of reference for truth and cultural development,” she says. “To grow healthy perennial seeds in the desert and care for them until they’ve materialised into blossoms.”

Dismissing the idea of speed over depth, Neel Jassani’s practice feels deliberate, rooted in the slow work of seeing, building, and nurturing. She is, in every sense, creating her own universe—one frame and one act of will at a time.