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11/08/2007: "Identity, Transience and the Eternal Landscape"
Hello from Dubai...
Overlooking an earlier blip this is my first post on the Absolute Arts site so ... hello...
I’m a British artist/teacher/international itinerant who moved reluctantly from London to Dubai in May, anticipating baking heat, constant construction, mega malls, more baking heat and possibly a bit of camel racing. That’s definitely all here BUT I was so pleasantly surprised by the emerging arts scene that I’ve started blogging about art in Dubai.
It all seems to have kicked off in the past few years and there are now several excellent galleries showing diverse and innovative work from all over the world. The first was the Majlis Gallery set up about 10 years ago to promote local artists, emerging regional talent and Dubai based ex-pat artists as well. Since then, many other galleries have appeared and art is becoming much more visible.
It should be noted here that the population of Dubai is at least 85% ex-pat. Of these the majority are South Asian with the rest a mix of Iranians, Europeans, Americans.... in fact everybody’s here! Dubai itself is the second largest of 7 emirates collectively forming the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It seems the art pioneer was actually the third largest emirate, Sharjah, which had its first biennial way back in 1993 and held its eighth, this year (Sharjah Biennial) Since then Dubai and the largest emirate, Abu Dhabi, have really upped the pace. Abu Dhabi is royally splashing the cash on architects with four huge projects ... a Frank Gehry Guggenheim, a Jean Nouvel Louvre, a Tadao Ando Maritime Museum and a Zaha Hadid performing arts centre (see ArcSpace).
Dubai is becoming a gateway between east and west and promoting itself as the location regardless of where you’re from or where you’re heading. Galleries are rapidly developing and the art market has concluded that Dubai is an excellent location too. This is influenced more by the disposable income index than by any notion of Dubai as a creative environment, but in March this year, Dubai held the first ever Gulf Art Fair (Art Dubai). This event attracted gallerists, curators and art buyers from all over the world and the cream of US, European and Asian contemporary galleries. Unfortunately, the local galleries were hardly represented at all but it was the work of Middle Eastern and Asian artists that sold best. This has also been the case with Christies, which has held two very successful regional auctions.
The most interesting aspect of the Gulf Art Fair for me personally, were the forums. There were international artist panels, a discussion on the philanthropic imperative that comes with commercial success and a focus on emerging regional arts movements (transcripts available shortly). Like so much in Dubai and the UAE in general, this event was essentially a high level import but its impact has been profound. As well as raising Dubai’s cultural profile internationally it also helped to define and highlight the needs of local creative development.
An inspired initiative called ‘Thinking Cloud’ has started to address these needs by convening regular discussions on art in the UAE. Laura Trelford, who worked on the Gulf Art Fair, invites a mix of panellists to each meeting who can cover all the bases - artists, commentators or critics and gallery or museum professionals. Meeting agendas are not set in advance but each develops organically according to the issues raised in the previous meeting. It aims to assemble arts connected and interested people across Dubai’s international spectrum and in the process build a knowledge base and capacity for creative development from within. There have been just three meetings so far but the response has been very positive - venues are offered for free and attendance is always large. Given how new this initiative is there isn’t a website yet but watch this space.
Another forum for cultural dialogue in Dubai is a book club called Kutub. Started out of the Thirdline Gallery (more on that later) in 2006, the club meets monthly to discuss books written by Middle Eastern authors. The books are usually available in Arabic and English and discussed among an internationally mixed and often bi-lingual crowd of Arabic literature lovers. They have great blog listing all the books that have been read and some of the discussions (Kutub Blog). This is all good but I have to say that my main frustration with Dubai is that native Emirati artists have been difficult to find. I have seen work from almost everywhere here but only a couple of paintings by one veteran native Abdul Qader Al Rais. 
Web searches have brought up a few more including Karima al Shomaly so I know they’re out there.
I think the gallery I like most in Dubai is the XVA.
This is partly because I’m lazy and its only five minutes walk from my house but also because its in the heritage area of Bastakia, one of the few places in Dubai with old style architecture and buildings. The XVA always has a mix of really interesting work on display and also has studio space for visiting artists as well as being a café and guesthouse. 
The exhibition that recently finished featured two artists who explore themes of identity in very different ways. Jagath Ravindra is a Sri Lankan artist born in Chilaw. Most of his work is acrylic on canvas, a medium he said he likes because it allows speed when the execution of a work is urgent. He works on a series of paintings representing general themes and this theme was Fights against Darkness. His paintings often use the motif of a recognisable human form within an abstracted landscape, or can be pure abstract explorations of colour.
Ravindra said that he primarily uses colour and light to express an idea, and the management of shapes within the image space create the dynamic and suggest the feeling. The idea of ‘darkness’ often relates to the external negativity of political and historical reality and to the internal negativity often present as a consequence of that reality. He believes that the fundamental perception of the artist is of a common human identity that does not perceive or mark division. Therefore there is always some tension with political perceptions in which lines are inevitably drawn.
There are only three works in which the darkness is literally represented by colour, giving the overall impression that the strength of brighter colours will always prevail. This is definitely a very colourful exhibition, but as he also said - Sri Lanka is a very colourful country...
Unfortunately there are not any images from this show available online yet but I have managed to get one here. For a look at contemporary artists in Sri Lanka in general please click on the link: Art Lanka
The second artist in this show, Tarek Al Ghoussein, is a Palestinian photographer, born in Kuwait, living in the UAE and teaching photography at the American University of Sharjah. He also works in a series and this was an installation of six prints that made up the Untitled C series. Printed on rice paper, the work explores identity but more directly in relation to transience and disintegration.
The installation was in a small room where viewers must walk in a zig-zag through the six sequential images hanging across the room with three on each side. In the first image, a large mound is covered with a blue tarpaulin in a stark, barren and almost colourless landscape. Images 2 and 3 begin a gradual disintegration of the first image. Suddenly in image no. 4 the figure of a man appears, his back to the viewer and his head obscured by the blue tarpaulin. In picture 5 he is gone, and now there are only different sized pieces of blue tarpaulin, clinging to a wire fence. In the final image all that remains are tiny fragments of blue in the stark and barren landscape.
Tarek likes working in series because the process is open so it can evolve as the work progresses. He says this piece can be seen as apocalyptic as it ends with nothing but traces of what went before. However, when exiting this installation you can take the same steps backwards so the effect is then one of constructing something from nothing.
What I personally liked was how it heightened the perception of time, in a way similar to certain video works in which one image is shown over an unspecified period. This connection actually made me imagine what the location might sound like, which was a nice extra dimension.
Most of the images and some earlier work are here Tarek al Ghoussein:
Photographs and for contemporary Palestinian artist images please click Palestine Index.
One of the best resource sites with extensive links to Palestinian, Middle East and international gallery and arts sites is the Birzeit University Virtual Gallery.
Finally, Al Quoz Industrial Zone 3 does not sound like a particularly attractive place, but sitting alongside commercial laundries, warehouses and car repair workshops are two of the best galleries in Dubai - B21 and the Thirdline.
New exhibitions have just opened and both feature work by well-known Iranian artists - Fereydoun Ave and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. 
Fereydoun Ave was born in 1945 in Teheran but spent some of his childhood in the UK. He then studied fine art in the US before returning to Teheran in 1970. Recently inspired by seeing new work by Cy Twombly, a key influence and mentor, Ave began new work. The B21 exhibition is entitled Lal Dahlias and is a series of mixed media work with an intense focus on those flowers, which were brought into his house to commemorate his mother (Lal).
Most of the dahlias are red although yellow makes a few appearances and there is one solitary blue. The impression as you enter the gallery is that of being surrounded by continuous little red explosions that you can almost hear. As you move closer they become more muted because many are covered by tracing paper applied while the paint is still very wet. The paper can obscure but not absorb the original image and is unable to hide the streaks of red racing like blood down the page. Several individual images like this are arranged into larger works making the layers and types of paper another key element. Sometimes one piece of the montage will just depict an outline sketch making a stark contrast to the urgent red splashes. 
The Thirdline gallery also has a good website so you can get a glimpse of the beautiful reverse painted glass and mirror geometries of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. She was born in 1924 in Qazvin, in north-western Iran. After two years at Teheran University, she went to New York in 1945 and studied at the Parsons School of Design. She worked as a layout artist at Bonwit Teller alongside Andy Warhol and stayed in New York until 1957, immersed in the richness of emergent abstract expressionism and minimalism. Apparently, she also hung out with Jackson Pollack... it’s hard not to be jealous.
She travelled throughout Iran on her return, exploring the historical richness of Iranian folk art and architecture. Her use of mirrors to create large geometric images reflects a form of architectural decoration in the 18th century when mirrors imported from Europe often arrived in Iran broken. The mirrors were salvaged and the pieces cut and reshaped to form geometric mirror mosaics. Another folk art technique was reverse glass painting also used to decorate houses and tents, often in more remote or tribal areas of Iran. These two elements are very visible in this exhibition.
The mix of mirrors with reverse painted glass creates a sublime beauty of reflection and intense almost metallic colour. I would love to know exactly what kind of paint this is but it was not specified. In some pieces very minimal use of this intense colour is highly effective, suggesting the difficulty of locating beauty among multiple reflections of a harsher reality. At the same time, Farmanfarmaian’s strict adherence to the underlying rules of geometry - balance (mizan) and unity (tawid) - gives each piece a reassuring strength and solidity.
This exhibition also features other work including hand drawn geometric designs and three memory boxes from a series she called ‘Heartaches’. The boxes use a rich mix of evocative materials and mementoes and seem very much like Farmanfarmaian’s very own personal folk art.
Iranian Art Links
Elahe Gallery - With extensive links to artists and other galleries in Iran
Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art - Contemporary work by Iranian artists and fascinating listing of the rarely seen western archive.
