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'I feel like Batman': Meet Emirati forensic artist behind Abu Dhabi Police's sketches
Most witnesses don't consciously remember a face; they recognise one, says Mubarak, insisting his job is far more psychology than drawing
- PUBLISHED: Sat 19 Sept 2026, 6:00 AM UPDATED: Fri 25 Sept 2026, 5:19 PM
A witness describes a face that exists only in memory. For Ghanem Mubarak, turning that description into something concrete on paper is less about drawing and more about reading a person's mind.
That instinct did not start with the job. Mubarak was around five when he watched his uncle Khalid, only seven years older than him, shade in the eye and nose of a wrestler's face and bring it to life on paper. "That was the first time I had seen someone draw in front of me," he says. He drew daily from then on, teaching himself through trial and error, with no YouTube to guide him.
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His family supported the talent, but not the career. At university, they were against him studying art itself, so he chose architecture instead, the closest subject he could find. "They told me to keep practising it on the side but choose something else as a profession," he says.
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A turning point
The job that reconciled both came out of nowhere. Major Saleh Al Marzouqi reached out to Mubarak on Instagram after seeing his drawings and invited him in.
The test was blunt: draw Brigadier Abdulrahman Al Hemadi, then director of the criminal evidence department at Abu Dhabi Police, from a photograph shown for only a few seconds before it was taken away.
The likeness held up, and in 2015, Mubarak joined the department that would define the next decade of his life. "There are days it genuinely feels a bit like being Batman," he says.
Ask him what people get wrong about the job, and he doesn't hesitate. "People assume it's like TV, that a witness describes a face and I draw exactly what they say, like a stenographer with a pencil. In reality, most witnesses don't consciously remember a face; they recognise one. My job is closer to interviewing memory itself. It's far more psychology than drawing."
He will not leave a session until the likeness is above 95 per cent and the witness is satisfied, and he has learned, without going into specifics, that his sketches have moved investigations forward. "Those moments are why the work matters to me," he says.
Ten years of sitting across from witnesses, often people still working through trauma, has changed how Mubarak works as an artist away from the job, too. He draws something every day, even a ten-minute sketch in his car, calling it a space to process things physically rather than carry them home in his head.
Staying emotionally open with a witness and then switching that openness off afterwards is something he has had to learn deliberately, "almost like taking off a piece of equipment," he says. His horses and Salukis help him reset in a way he says nothing else quite does.
The field itself has evolved around him, too. Pencil, paper and reference books have given way to compositing software and, increasingly, artificial intelligence, though he is wary of it replacing the process rather than assisting it.
"An algorithm optimised for plausible faces can smooth exactly the details that matter most," he says. He recently took part in the UAE's first AI art group exhibition, held with Tashkeel at the Museum of the Future.
Outside the interview room, Mubarak's world keeps expanding rather than narrowing. He breeds Arabian horses at his own stud farm, Al Mouj, treating conformation and bloodlines as their own art form, and still fences competitively, a discipline he picked up in middle school and never put down. If anything, he argues, each pursuit sharpens the others. "They all reinforce one another through precision, focus, creativity and an eye for beauty," he says.
Asked what he would want people to take from his story, Mubarak does not point to his badge or his exhibitions. "Everyone should practise a creative skill and give it real time every day," he says, "not for money, status or recognition, but for the sake of creativity itself."
Emirati Journalist