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11/06/2008: "Land Change: Art and the Environment."
In a pleasant change from reviews of other peoples work, I am very happy to be able to report on something of my own this month. At the end of October I took part in a panel discussion and exhibition in Abu Dhabi organised by the Abu Dhabi Authority of Culture and Heritage and the Goethe Institute. 
The theme of the exhibition was land change, art and the environment and it featured 5 artists who work in some way with environmental issues. The main artist was German photographer Petra Petrick who showed a series of photographs called ‘German Desert’. The images are desolate, barren and beautiful just like real deserts but actually taken at the abandoned sites of former open cast coalmines in Germany.
One of three Emirati artists in the show, Abdullah al Saadi, exhibited a panoramic scroll of the Khorfakkan coastline as observed from regular boat trips out into the bay. Khorfakkan is a mountainous, coastal area north of Dubai and al Saadi’s work monitors change as new buildings, especially hotels, arise and aspects of the natural landscape are removed. In some cases this has included chunks of mountain used as foundations for some of Dubai’s artificial islands. 
Muna al Ali arranges potted plants in various stages of growth to comment on the inevitable cycles of life and decay but also to comment on the effects of human interaction with the environment. The first time I saw this installation called ‘Dialogue with Nature’ was in the Creek Art fair last March. At that time all the plants were very healthy looking but the dialogue is now communicating something much less optimistic.
Mohammed Kazem had two sets of photographs in the exhibition. One illustrated the rapid urbanisation of the landscape around Dubai and the other used small details of urban infrastructure to create unidentifiable, abstracted images.
My work consisted of three ‘Towers of Trash’ which also featured in the Creek Art fair last year, and two paintings from a series called ‘Artificial Landscapes’. The towers were a response to the fact there was no recycling programme in Dubai when I arrived and for a while I actually kept my recyclable trash assuming I would eventually discover where to put it! In the end it seemed appropriate to transform my collection into something that reflected the most common and iconic image of Dubai which is its skyline.
The paintings essentially take a traditional form but remove it from the associated idea of landscape as bucolic idyll. They are painted on board, also found in the trash, and depict landscapes but in a totally artificial way using unnatural colours, textures and perspectives. The materials used include industrial printing inks, car paint, bleach and other substances reflecting the fact they are landscapes created in a totally urban environment.
In the panel discussion itself the artists talked about how their work relates to changes in the environment around them and reflects and interprets these changes. Petra Petrick’s haunting photographs are testament to industrially devastated landscapes and Abdullah al Saadi is chronicling contemporary landscape loss. Meanwhile Muna al Ali’s work suggests that a dialogue with nature is probably easier while it still seems relatively healthy.
My paintings work on general themes but the towers are site-specific and reflect the fact that Dubai is the fastest growing city in the world and has the highest amount of waste per capita.
What was interesting in the discussion was that the main question seemed to be whether the artists were being critical of the pace of development in the UAE. This was a delicate issue to address but ultimately the panel agreed that artists interpret what they see rather than make judgements about it. Therefore none of the work is meant as unambiguous criticism but is more a mechanism to raise questions about issues of land use, environmental sustainability and even public health.
This discussion was particularly interesting for me in a month that also held a forum entitled ‘Critiquing Art in the Middle East’. The aim of the forum was to explore the difficulties of critique in a media environment that tends to cut and paste the press release and where public criticism of any kind is a cultural anathema. There is a rather large gap between this context and the occidental view of criticism as a separate discipline necessary for creative and intellectual development. However, the fact that issues like these are starting to arise suggests a gradual maturing of the art scene here and a genuine local desire to start concentrating on the substance of cultural, rather than purely economic development. In a month that also witnessed such global financial turmoil this is really rather encouraging!
