This will be my last post from the UAE. In fact by the time you read this I will already be on my way back to gorgeous grey clouds of the average UK summertime. The last two years of living first in Dubai and then in Sharjah, have been a decidedly mixed experience but I have learned a lot and really enjoyed the exposure to the diverse international art I have seen here. What is perhaps most bizarre is that it took me several months to find an actual Emirati artist but now they seem to be everywhere. It has been very interesting to see how phenomenally the cultural sector has grown just in the last two years and how arts development can become a kind of nationalism in the absence of any other type of overt political statement! I actually arrived in Dubai in May 2007 in the final week of the 8th Sharjah Biennale so I didn’t get to see very much of it. However, 2007 seems to have been the key year. Dubai held its first international Art Fair and fringe in March and not to be outdone, Abu Dhabi followed suit with Art Paris-Abu Dhabi in November. Galleries started to proliferate and three very distinct art areas emerged in Dubai which now has plans for a Museum of Modern Middle Eastern Art, an opera house and various other museums and arts dedicated areas. Meanwhile Abu Dhabi is getting a ‘starchitect’ designed Guggenheim, Louvre, Maritime museum and performing arts centre.
The culmination of all this activity seems to have been the launch of the first ever UAE pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Actually the UAE had not one, but two pavilions at Venice…. the competitive squabbling between Dubai and Abu Dhabi even spilled over into the most prestigious art platform in the world resulting in one national UAE pavilion organised out of Dubai and a Platform for Venice set up by Abu Dhabi.
However, despite this frenzy of arts and cultural development which has really raised the UAE’s international profile it is still not a good environment for artists on the ground unless they have substantial independent economic means. It is a very expensive place to live (although rents are coming down since the credit crunch), there is almost no studio space and the constant pressure to earn money is just not conducive to artistic output. In two years I have reworked some old paintings, produced four average prints, a digital montage of the Dubai skyline and four towers of trash! However, the towers were a great success and gave me two of the highlights of my time here. They were exhibited first in the Creek Art fair in Dubai and then travelled to the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi where they were part of an exhibition and panel discussion on Art and the Environment. It’s a shame I never got to exhibit anything in Sharjah but another real highlight was working on the Sharjah Biennale catalogue and I am very happy I was able to do that. It gave me a lot to think about on many different levels and I have assimilated (i.e. stolen) ideas about processes, materials, concepts and ways of communicating that I will take back to the UK with me. I don’t know yet how this and all my experiences over the past two years will come out in my work. However, the best thing is that I go back to the UK knowing I have a rare period ahead of me where I simultaneously have the two key commodities of time AND money! This means that I can sift through it all at leisure in my own space and then just focus on externalisation and production. I have (mostly) enjoyed being a facilitator, promoter and reviewer of other peoples art over the past two years BUT I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to just being an artist for while again.
Created by Valerie Grove On 06/19/09 At 11:27 AM
Kentucky born and bred artist Brad Everett Kirkman is what some people might call an “outsider artist.” He isn’t trained, but some might say he’s anointed. Looking at his work, you can clearly see that he’s not only driven by art, but also a message. He works full-time for a precision manufacturing company, but art is his true calling and message. Incidentally, we had this chat long ago and begin by talking about his old website which has since changed to 
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. 
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. 
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. 
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. 
Art News Blog will now have an article posted on the 
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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!
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.
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.
