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05/22/2008: "Spring turns to summer in Dubai"
As the temperature goes up, Dubai winds down and the summer exodus begins. It is http://www.artdubai.ae/ a huge contrast to the frenzy of early spring when Art Dubai becomes the axis around which so much else revolves. It was March 18-22 so it already seems like a long time ago that the press releases were cut and pasted along with endless gushing about how fantastic it all was. Critical analysis has yet to find a home n Dubai! 
Journalistic cynicisms aside, there were some real highlights. My personal favourite was Desperately Seeking Paradise, a group show of contemporary Pakistani art curated especially for Art Dubai's new Pakistan Pavilion. Huma Mulji's suitcase installation addresses the lives of migrant labourers in Dubai. A suitcase of golden shoes and bread suggests the riches they seek but which they ultimately build for others. A suitcase of showers had a speaker in each shower head, one narrating dreams of employment in Dubai and the other narrating the drawbacks. Also on show were video installations of interviews projected onto cardboard boxes, disturbing clay figures laying face down in the flowerbeds and the interesting results of a photography workshop given by students of the American University of Dubai to twelve labourers.
My personal Art Dubai gripe was the Credit Suisse, Art and Entrepreneurship project unveiled to great fanfare at Art Dubai. http://www.artandentrepreneurship.com/ The project involved 20 artists (one of whom wisely wishes to remain anonymous) who were asked to create work based on a Credit Suisse client survey. The focus was apparently the five core values of entrepreneurship. 
From the artists' point of view, I assume the first of these was making friends with Credit Suisse and their work encapsulated the ultimate core value of money for old rope. I have problems with calling this art. Isn't it just product commissioning for an innovative corporate PR campaign?? Had they asked me I think my contribution would have been a garden implement entitled 'This is a Spade' but I'm probably just jealous that I didn't come up with duvet on a stick!
The fringe Creek Art Fair http://www.creekartfair.com/ was much more fun. A bit dishevelled, of dubious quality and open to leisurely browsing for two whole weeks in the oldest and most interesting part of the city. The most striking thing about it was that it seemed to be the first real gathering of an emerging UAE creative network. There were a few imports but most of the participants were local galleries, universities, design outfits and a significant number of Emirati artists.
There were a lot of other things going on at the same time making it a very busy couple of months and in the midst of it all came two government announcements. The first was about the establishment of a new Dubai Arts and Culture Authority and the second unveiled plans for the huge Khor Cultural Development project. As well as galleries it includes museums, theatres and an opera house so the emerging creative network is probably going to end up with much more work than it wants! 
So that was spring but there are still a few interesting things to see before extreme summer kicks in. The Meem gallery is showing what is essentially a retrospective of the Gulf's best-known artist Abdullah al Muharraqi (image 1 of this blog), who is sometimes referred to as the Salvador Dali of the Gulf. Born in Bahrain in 1939, Al Muharraqi studied in Cairo and Damascus and now has an entire hall devoted to his work in the Museum of Modern Arabic Art in Qatar. He also designed most of Bahrain's stamps! The earliest work in this show is from 1967 and goes up until 2006.
As always, entering the Meem gallery space itself makes a huge impact, perhaps too much in this case because some of the work then seemed disappointing after that initial impression. However, what was most striking was how uniquely 'Gulfie' much of the work was. It reveals the Gulf as a harsh existence revolving around the dark terrors of the ocean. The work creates an atmosphere that is so far removed from the current Dubai PR model of the Gulf it's hard to believe it came out of the same region. I got more of a sense of historic and geographic reality through this one show than I've got in an entire year of being in Dubai. That said I do remember being very affected during last December's film festival by the harsh and menacing atmosphere in several short films made by local filmmakers. So maybe the link is there even if the fear is now for different reasons. 
Many of Al Muharraqi's paintings concern pearl diving and divers. Pearls were a significant industry before the 1930s when the Japanese worked out how to culture pearls rather than relying on luck or god to provide an accommodating oyster. The dangers of the pearl divers� often short lives and the imbalance between that and the life of the pearl itself are obviously things that Al Muharraqi felt very deeply. The most compelling picture in the show is 'The Divers Tragedy' from 1973, which gives a cyclical illustration of the life of a pearl and the diver's associated sorrows. 
Many of the earlier paintings focus on this subject and very effectively communicate the horror and the dread associated with this kind of life. However, there is thread which runs through the whole show that is way over on the dark side � starvation, decay, vengeance and environmental devastation as in 'Catastrophe' from 1984. Later work, especially from the past few years has strong political overtones. Several of these paintings worked very well - the palpable tensions in 'Opposition' and 'The Nations Game' for example. However, there were obviously some sensitivities. The title label of one work was actually obscured by the frame and only if you lifted the corner of the picture could you see that title was 'The Regression of Arab Civilisation'. It could have been a hanging error but I don�t think so.
'Martyr's Souls' from 2002 didn't work so well. An otherwise sensitive image related to Palestinian suffering was eclipsed by a small and bizarre depiction of the perceived ethnic cause that could have come straight out of 1930s German propaganda. Other figurative expressions of this conflict I have seen tend to focus on the contemporary realities of the Israeli military but this was like some kind of time warp. Most weird was the fact that it seemed so gratuitous and badly painted it was almost as if somebody else had done it! Very strange but a definite reminder that crude propaganda rarely makes good art!
