One of the main areas for art galleries and activity in Dubai is the Al Quoz Industrial Zone. As the name suggests the area is grimy, dusty and mechanical, inhabited by warehouses, factories, storage depots and wholesale outlets. When rents were skyrocketing elsewhere in Dubai this area was still relatively cheap and the large and empty premises were ideal for conversion to gallery spaces so over the past five years or so a lot of galleries have set up here.

There are risks to living in an industrial zone and reports of warehouse fires are frequent. However a massive explosion and fire last year resulted in several casualties, 3 destroyed warehouses and a thick cloud of toxic smoke which hung over the whole city. Luckily none of the galleries were close enough to the site of the fire to be seriously affected and since then it seems that fire safety precautions have been improved.

This is the background to the current exhibition at Total Arts gallery that has to rate among the most memorable I have seen in Dubai during my two years here. Total Arts was founded by architect Darius Zandi and artist Shaqayeq Arabi and was the first gallery to set up in Al Quoz way back in 1996. After the fire Zandi and Arabi visited the burnt out warehouse and were so affected by what they saw they began a long process of transporting things from the site back to the gallery.

The result is Scraps, an installation composed entirely of materials, artefacts and incidental objects found at the site with site photos projected against two of the gallery walls. The scale of the installed pieces varies from huge warped sheets of corrugated metal suspended from ceilings and used to create artificial walls, to small and fragile fragments of paper or cloth.

Some pieces stand on plinths like highly original sculptures, most amazingly a collection of hundreds of pairs of metal scissors all melded together by the heat of the fire. A partially collapsed bicycle stands precariously upright surrounded by different piles of objects fused in plastic, metal and wood. There are melted tins, jars, knives, safety pins, toothbrushes, bicycle pumps, a cash register and many other everyday objects rendered almost unrecognisable by the furnace they emerged from.

Many of the smaller finds have been transformed by the artists into installations in their own right. One wall is covered with blackened food trays set with piles of melted forks and spoons and a metal sheet is covered with knife blades. A series of boxes contain a curious mix of objects, scraps of documents, textiles and electrical wires.

The exhibition is a unique and moving memorial to those who died. It is a wondrous and disturbing sensory experience crystallised by a soundtrack of muffled explosions and the all pervading odour of burnt metal, wood and plastic. It manages to address several different levels and aspects of its own particular local context as well as referencing wider points of aesthetics and art history – a dual achievement still very rare in exhibitions here.

Created by Valerie Grove On 05/22/09 At 10:08 AM

The United Arab Emirates’ enthusiastic embrace of all things cultural in recent years has resulted in a lot of attention being paid to Dubai and Abu Dhabi – both now host commercial art fairs and both have cultural mega-projects on the way. Less attention has been paid to the smaller Emirate of Sharjah which is doing neither of these things but remains quietly confident about its status as the real cultural capital of the UAE.
There is justification in this claim. Sharjah is the founder and home of the Emirates Fine Arts Society, was the UNESCO capital of Arab culture in 1998 and is currently home to more museums than Abu Dhabi and Dubai combined. However, perhaps the greatest evidence of Sharjah’s pioneering role in cultural development is the fact that since 1993 it has hosted its own biennale, the 9th edition of which opened on March 19th and will run until May 19th.

The main exhibition component of this Biennale called Provisions for the Future loosely explores how fictionalized notions of utopia can provide motivation for movement from one place to another. It also reflects on how action in the present either does or doesn’t provide security in the future. With a strong focus on experimentation and process, site-specific installation work was very much encouraged and this experimental ethos extended to the Biennale catalogue. This is a 2-part collaborative project between the Biennale, Bidoun Magazine, the Khatt Foundation and the 58 artists themselves. Part I focuses on creative process rather than finished product so each artist provided materials showing how the work emerged, from conceptual thought and preliminary visualization, to actual local layout planning and logistics. Part II of the catalogue will be published to coincide with Art Dubai in 2010 and will complete the process by documenting what actually happened in the Biennale. However, it is fascinating to be able to make these comparisons yourself as you see each work.

Diana Al–Hadid’s partially collapsed structural installation was inspired by the Tower of Babel story and the patterns in a fingerprint. Despite the materials used and the size of the work it sat very delicately in a plaza in front of the Sharjah Art Museum which was covered with text by Lawrence Weiner. Nearby Maidar Lopez had intervened by drawing football field gridlines and installing a water fountain. This transformed the space especially in the evening when it was packed with kids playing football. Laurent Grasso’s large blue neon in Arabic reading ‘The wider the vision, the narrower the statement’ also worked well with the distinct Sharjah space and was perfectly placed in a long arched corridor. Prize for the most striking installation, however, has to go to Lara Faveretto. Her row of brightly coloured carwash brushes spinning purposefully in a large open courtyard was truly awesome.

Two installations consisted of dark mazes incorporating video and sound pieces. Around each corner of Agnes Janich’s maze, Man to Man, were video projections of snarling and barking dogs or bloody bones and the noisy and claustrophobic space is constructed to make wrong dark dead ends very likely. On entering Lamia Joreige’s maze, Three Triptychs, music is triggered along with a camera which projects your progress onto a facing screen. In the next section you are abruptly removed from the image. Some of the video imagery is taken from the Tarkovsky film Solaris and projected onto the floor as well as onto screens while other imagery relates to the war in Lebanon. Some of the atmospheric audio input was arranged by musician, artist and techno whizz, Tarek Atoui. Interestingly Janich’s maze as presented in the catalogue was tangible enough to predict but Joreige’s impossible even to imagine. Similarly, the catalogue could not prepare you for the treat of Hala Elkoussy’s archive which was a small separate room crammed with photos, paintings, video screens and many other strange and wonderful items. It was an absolute dream space for hoarders, collectors, and thrift shop junkies.

Another installation highlight was N.S. Harsha’s Nations consisting of hundreds of sewing machines loosely connected by tangled cotton and each draped with the flag of a different nation. The sheer scale of it made it look like an Asian sweatshop. Meanwhile, Firoz Mahmud’s Halycon Tarp was another epic cross-media installation using the Bengal tiger as a motif to reveal aspects of Bangladeshi history, society and politics as well as drawing attention to the perils facing the tigers themselves.

Decoder by Alberto Duman was supposed to be a tall outdoor tower of shopping trolleys. However, what transpired was a mini stack of trolleys on sand surrounded by photographs of trolleys in the desert and the plans for the original work. This was a great example of how an ambitious and experimental work could be successfully modified owing to difficulties with on-site logistics and how this process in itself could alter the meaning of the work.

Some work, however, didn’t live up to its catalogue expectations at all. Juan Araujo’s oil paintings on wood ended up being completely different to what was proposed and much less engaging. In the case of Doug Henders it was hard to relate the actual work to his carefully presented concepts which was very frustrating. This had the unfortunate result of making the catalogue pages seem more interesting that the work itself!

There was a lot of innovative video work in the Biennale but those that stood out most for me were by Sharif Waked and Nikolaj Larsen. Waked uses the now familiar media image of a suicide bomber’s last broadcast but his protagonist reads excerpts from One Thousand and One Nights instead thus avoiding the horrific denouement. This mirrors the origin of the tales themselves in which Scheherazade narrates one gripping tale after another to King Shahrayar in order to save herself and her tribe from execution. Nikolaj Larsen’s work consists of two videos projected onto facing screens. On one screen Indian migrant workers based in Sharjah stand staring into the camera. On the opposite screen their families back in India do the same. Sitting in that space between the screens the viewer has to make the connections resulting in a very intimate and moving experience.

There was also a performance, theatre and film programme which provided a rare opportunity to see theatrical performances like Richard III, An Arab Tragedy, Sulayman Al Bassam’s dramatic adaptation of the Shakespeare play relocated to the contemporary Gulf. Placing the historical play in this modern context obviously reveals the relevance of Shakespearean themes across time and cultures but also gives a fascinating insight into how cultural activity can delicately reframe regional political discourse. By contrast, Elena Kovylina’s performance ‘Un cri dans le silence’ provided a moment of complete dislocation from cultural context. The performance was a scene re-enactment from Brigitte Bardot’s 1964 film And God Created Woman. It involved chicks, rabbits and a sexy dance in high heels and almost transparent dress. It was completely bizarre and I’m still not convinced I didn’t dream it!

Obviously there is a lot more to cover in something of this size and scale and this review really does not do it justice. Fortunately it goes on until May 19th so I am anticipating a lot more time down in the cultural capital of the UAE…

Links
Sharjah Biennale http://www.sharjahbiennial.org/en/default.html
Bidoun http://www.bidoun.com/
Khatt Foundation http://www.khtt.net/

Created by Valerie Grove On 03/26/09 At 11:38 AM

I recently saw a show at the Jam Jar in Dubai, which featured five young Pakistani artists from the Grey Noise Gallery in Lahore. The Jam Jar is one of the few real community arts organisations in Dubai so it doesn’t have to be as commercially slick as the local norm. This means it can show work that is more youth oriented and often experimental.

The show was called ‘Let’s Talk’ and it represented a dialogue between the five artists in which the work shown is linked as if it were a conversation. The central pillar of the whole concept was a small catalogue containing actual email dialogue and images the five artists exchanged when the show was in the planning stage. It was essential to read this catalogue, not only to help you understand what you saw, but also because it enabled a real sense of involvement in the show itself.

The catalogue provided a basic structure of the conversation being had in the work. After that it was up to the viewer to work out exactly where and how the different layers of the conversation intersected. This was challenging in itself because it was not always obvious. Just like a real conversation there were things that were unsaid, slight tangents and unresolved points. However, when juxtaposing the conversation being had by the work with the emailed exchanges between the artists, the show became a complete and cohesive entity. Silences in one and omissions in the other also became comprehensible.

The strongest conversational thread in the work was music or sound. The show began with Lala Rukh’s sound collage containing elements of nature, politics and traditional music with religious associations. Following on from this was Ayesha Jalal’s line of ‘sound words’ running the length of the opposite wall ending in the word ‘boom’. A full stop was provided by a very simple abstract red and white print entitled ‘Where is my God’? Turning the corner you see six small white graves each containing a different book. The interesting mix of titles spans a time frame of more than 10 years but the most recent is the biography of Benazir Bhutto. The creator of these works, Ayaz Jokhio, is strangely absent from the catalogue discussion.

Next is one of Mehreen Murtaza’s large prints evoking sci-fi, technology, creation and myth, an image that does not seem to relate directly to the conversation but is understood when placed in the context of the email exchanges. Her other print relates more directly to the sound motif but also explores faith and technology as instruments of control.

Around the next corner ‘Echo’ and ‘Sleeper’ by Fahd Burki are not what you expect to see having read the email exchanges and this intensifies the feeling that you have established an intimate relationship with the artists. The connection to the conversation in terms of sound is obvious but there are other more subtle undercurrents apparent from the information you have been given.

It’s difficult to elaborate further because the presence of the catalogue is so central to the experience. It becomes like a puzzle, which you have to solve and the more effort you put into it the more rewarding it is. It is a nice redefinition of interactive – one in which exclusively mental rather than physical processes become the ones interacting with the work. What is perhaps most amazing is that you get all this from only eight pieces of work and a rather diminutive catalogue! So the show may be small but it is perfectly formed.

That said you do leave wanting more. Although you can keep reflecting on the concept and the different ways in which the conversation works, you want it to develop. Perhaps into another room, with another catalogue, different artists and a counter argument! However, this would be a different show and it probably needs to remain small because another thing I found was that it was hard to see the individual pieces in their own right. They became secondary to the larger concept and it was that, and the mental challenges associated with this show, which remained rather than the work itself.

It is very unusual to go to an exhibition and leave with such a strong understanding of the whole creative process from defining the concept, creating the work and addressing the practicalities of putting it all together. It may be a little too much effort for the average glamorous gallery goer here but for the artists it’s great!

Created by Valerie Grove On 12/01/08 At 08:22 AM

Before I came to the UAE I knew there were at least 10 Emirati artists. I had their names and images in a book published in 1982 by the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States. However, on arrival in Dubai I faced a major problem – there was no National Museum or Art Gallery so no obvious place to find them. It actually took me six months to find a local artist but it is amazing that just over a year later, I am now aware of more than 200 and have actually seen the work of well over 50.

This is largely thanks to independent arts organisations and the fact that my search coincided with a national identity crisis in the UAE. Concern about losing a sense of national self is particularly acute in Dubai, where nationals are at highest estimates only 10 per cent of the population. This resulted in 2008 being designated the ‘year of national identity’ by the UAE government making it a good time to propose projects focussing on local culture and local creative output.

The first real result of this is an unprecedented government sponsored exhibition featuring over 100 works by 22 local artists, which opened last week in Dubai. The artists range from veteran painters to a new generation of photographers and graphic designers. There are also literally second-generation artists such as the son and daughter of the UAEs most well known artist Abdul Qader Al Rais.

The conservative tendency in visual arts has been an association with ‘heritage’ as a means of defining identity, generally meaning falcons, dates, horses and camels. A younger and more global generation is obviously rather less enamoured of this limiting image of the nation and ‘nationality’ in art seems rather antithetical to the contemporary international climate anyway. So it was very interesting to see how much would emerge from this show that was distinctly ‘Emirati’.

The first works you see are by Reem Al Ghaith and are familiar from the Dubai Next show at Art Basel. There is a palpable sense of dislocation in her three huge prints of a solitary figure inside a frame or seemingly reflected in a mirror against a backdrop of various Dubai locations. They also make an impression by sheer virtue of their size despite being obscured by several stone pillars. So the initial impact of this show is clearly Emirati.

The only other works in the courtyard itself are nine small sculptures of animals and figures made out of scrap metal by Mohammed Abdullah. With the exception of one in the shape of a mosque, these could have been done anywhere, as could the abstract paintings of Ahmed Sharif and Mohammad Al Qassab in room one. Four collages by Ali al Adnan were definitively regional featuring historical cultural figures from the Gulf including one Emirati. Accompanying these were Karima Al Shomeily’s very direct photographs of partially obscured female faces which also had a very local flavour.

In the next two rooms, Khalid Al Banna’s work with its contrasting textures and shades of black, white and grey and Alia Al Shamsi’s photographs of modern mannequins and mechanical fortune-tellers addressed aesthetic universalities. However, Khalid Mezaina’s quirky graphics epitomising a fun and funky side of contemporary Dubai were a great example of modern generational sensibilities. Mohammed Al Habtoor also picked up on this feeling but without making a specific visual connection to the locality. His big cartoon faces suggested Disney on acid to me but provoked much discussion, were very popular among the younger generation and have resulted in a solo show when this one is over!

Similarly, Summaya Al Suwaidi’s photographic images contained nothing distinctly local in content but did seem to be staking a claim for some kind of new local genre of their own. UAE gothic perhaps? The unsettling atmosphere in Lateefa Maktoum’s consumate study of perspective could also fit this category.

Farid al Rais, daughter of the UAE’s most famous artist Abdul Qader al Rais had five works in the show – two large acrylics and three smaller pieces traditional in style if not wholly in content. Her brother Musab al Rais also had five large painted works in a different room. Both are influenced by their father’s work to the extent that all I can see is variations on his earlier themes but I guess this makes them second generation practitioners of a pioneering local style!

Of the other work in the show that connected physically to the locale, Alya al Sanad’s faces covered in sand are sensual and intense while her photographs of vague figures taken through a dirty windscreen are like stills from a UAE road movie that hasn’t been made yet. In one of four video works Khalil Abdul Wahid filmed a short journey through his windscreen with visibility so bad at times due to fog or rain, that I’m sure he was risking a serious accident. It was quite a relief when he put the windscreen wipers on!

There are two more rooms and six other artists in this show who I haven’t even mentioned here including several exhibiting for the first time so there is more to be seen and certainly more to be said. The show demonstrates that local artists are creating diverse work bearing little relation to the traditionally favoured images of the past, and are interpreting and revealing a very different present. They are essentially producing what will be the creative ‘heritage’ of the UAE in a few decades time. However, it is unlikely that you will be able to chart these developments by walking into a single public institution any time soon. Considering that you will be able to walk into a Louvre and a Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi and a Berlin State Museum in Dubai, this is a national tragedy.

Another tragedy, or perhaps mystery, is that despite the official support for this show there has been very little publicity and no information is available on the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority website or indeed anywhere else. Hopefully, there will at least be a few reviews before it closes on October 6th but even if gambling were legal here, I wouldn’t put money on it!

Created by Valerie Grove On 10/02/08 At 09:13 AM

Managed to avoid the excess heat of the Dubai summer this year by spending much of July and August contemplating the infinite shades of grey and green in a very wet Europe. Got back to Dubai to find that I no longer have a job!

The project I was working on was gradually being subsumed into a government body when I left and by the time I returned it had been swallowed up completely. Apparently this is not unusual. I have since heard of other proposals and projects that are taken over and the external consultants unceremoniously dumped. However, despite being unemployed, incomeless and back to square one in the job search, I am surprisingly sanguine about the whole affair. I’m happy with what I did and the whole experience has provided a fascinating insight into the chaotic, schizophrenic and slightly brutal nature of local cultural politics. Also being unemployed does have advantages. September marks the beginning of the post summer season and all the galleries have new shows so I should have time to see them all this year!

I started a few days ago with a trip the Third Line Gallery showing its war themed exhibition ‘Roads were Open / Roads were Closed’. The Third Line is the most successful gallery in Dubai. It has the most staff, some of the most lucrative artists (like Farhad Moshiri) and last spring it opened a new gallery space in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Third Line artists are usually connected in some way to the region but may have been brought up elsewhere or lived between two or more cultures. This allows for a multiplicity of influences and interpretations – very appropriate for the global and transient nature of Dubai.

‘Roads were Open / Roads were Closed’ featured five artists interpreting either direct or indirect experience of the Palestinian and Lebanese conflicts. The exhibition’s focus was on exploring how we register trauma and perceive conflict. However, the work was also very much about how artists interpret history and preserve or package national and political as well as personal memory.

As you entered the gallery, Palestinian Layla Shawwa’s ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ was a striking start. The huge slingshot complete with large stone sitting on a stand in the middle of the gallery floor is an immediately recognisable symbol of military asymmetry and moral triumph. The piece and its ironic title acknowledge this standard interpretation but Layla Shawwa’s point is more complex. In the absence of any forward movement, the symbol now stands as an impotent victim of its own mythology. It becomes a memory around which an uneasy internal dialogue revolves rather than being the external symbol of strength that it once was.

Photographer Tarek Al Ghoussein is also Palestinian but born in Kuwait and living in the UAE. As a consequence he is not directly exposed to the conflict but still needs to process and interpret his connection to it. His photographs, all taken in the UAE, depict huge and featureless concrete walls reflecting both the reality of the Palestinian situation and his inaccessibility to that reality. He also photographs barren desert spaces sometimes juxtaposing the two themes. When placing himself in the images he is inevitably dwarfed either by space or by containment.

Fouad El Khoury documents a month of his life in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 when Beirut came under serious bombardment following the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. The technique is a series of prints that show his diary page for each day. Sometimes the whole page is situated inside his house surrounded by the normalcy of household items. Other times the text is superimposed on events taking place outside the house, sometimes images familiar from news reports during that period. At the same time as news of what is happening in the nation is reported in his diary, a parallel tragedy is unfolding in his personal life as a relationship fails which makes a nice if obvious juxtaposition of the personal and the political. The whole photo series covers an entire wall of the gallery and makes an impact as both visual and emotional archive.

A very different approach is taken by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige whose multi part project ‘Wonder Beirut’ documents the earlier civil war period using the ‘Story of the Pyromaniac Photographer’. This was Abdallah Farah, a photographer commissioned by the Lebanese tourist board to take postcard images of Beirut in the late 1960s. With the onset of the civil war in 1975, he systematically burned or altered the slides and negatives he used for the postcards to reflect the damage of battle. This results in some fantastic images with parts melted and blackened but retaining postcard colour intensity at the same time. Others such as the ‘Battle of the Hotels’ show sequences of the same postcard image gradually being destroyed.

Another part of the project relates to Abdallah Farah’s many rolls of film, which were never developed, first because of a lack of materials and then out of choice. Each roll is carefully dated, some as recently as 2000, and their contents documented so you are able to read the images but not see them. This part of the project is called ‘Latent Images’. Latency is apparently an engineering term meaning the time delay between the initiation of an action and its results. So the consequences of the action remain unobserved in the present. What a perfect notion for an exhibition about conflict!

The Thirdline Gallery

http://www.thethirdline.com/

Created by Valerie Grove On 09/11/08 At 11:14 AM