A Sense Of Community, Al Bastakiya Art Fair - May/June 2009
By Jonathan Thomson
Al Bastakiya is one of the most intriguing places in the world for an art fair. This year’s Fair was better organized and much more manageable than earlier versions. Yet, whatever the changes to the Fair, the feeling of a strong art community remains.
When it was first run, in 2007, the Creek Art Fair in Dubai was a modest gathering of like-minded artists, galleries, and curators who came together to help bring a sense of community to the world of art where previously there was none. Three years on, the fair has a new name, the Al Bastakiya Art Fair, a new sponsor, and a more critical edge.
Bastakiya is Dubai’s most engaging neighborhood. Established in the late-19th century by wealthy merchants on the shores of Dubai Creek, its narrow lanes and courtyard houses with wind towers and roof terraces have been beautifully restored and now house art galleries, cultural institutions, cafes, and boutique hotels.
This year, however, the number of houses involved in the Fair dropped from 20 to 13 (out of 55 separate houses in the whole district,) but by taking up new venues and giving them over to a number of different artists and galleries who were selected from a larger group of applicants, this year’s edition provided a much broader range.
Timed to coincide with Art Dubai, the Bastakiya Art Fair holds itself out as being “fringe” and a public space for emerging talent, but much of the work presented was more critically engaged than the slick offerings of its bigger sister.
There is a big difference between self-censorship and not starting a fight that you know you cannot possibly win. The first requires you to cower in the face of an authority and bend to its will, saying nothing; while the second means knowing when you are on a hiding to nothing, and yet are still willing to push, to step up to an authority and antagonize it but not quite tip it over the edge into action against you.
It is a delicate balancing act that Halim Al Karim manages while living in Dubai, the second most important state in the federation of the United Arab Emirates. As an Iraqi artist living in exile in the UAE, he knows that if his work is recognized as being explicitly political, his visa may be revoked. His work critiques the current political situation in much of the Arab world by alluding to the most indulgent excesses of the Ottoman Empire, former overlords of most of this geo-political area, and by drawing parallels between it and many of the region’s current social, political, and economic injustices.
Al Karim’s new work at XVA Gallery comprised beguilingly beautiful photographs of women, sumptuously dressed, and either reclining on a sofa or standing but always against a blank, pale-gray background. The works are simultaneously intriguing and evasive as they are all somewhat blurred and indistinct.
The series, entitled Untitled (from The King’s Hareem series) positions these works as part of a critical examination of Orientalist painting and its disingenuous depictions of events in Turkey, the Levant, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula in the 17th and 18th centuries, and of current events.
Women in their quarters was the most popular theme of Orientalist painting and the notion of the harem came to symbolize languid indulgence, and evoked visions of the ruler of the house surrounded by a bevy of eager, naked young women. In fact the harem was more mundane and was a place of sanctuary where women were safe from observation from the outside world.
Al Karim’s technique of photographing his subjects through a veil of fine silk is both a barrier between viewer and image and a metaphor for the ways in which some of the leaders of the Arab world fail to register the turmoil within their societies. Orientalist painting and Al Karim’s photographs both gain significance through omission—by helping us focus on those things that they choose not to depict.
In another series of works he turns his attention to the West. His series of photographs all Untitled (From the Urban Witness series) were originally conceived in 2002 but not printed until more recently when the artist gained access to Lambda print technology. Durst developed lambda printers, in 1994, as a laser-supported, large-format output device for the high-resolution exposure of digital pictures and text data on all conventional photo materials.
By using the lasers, the total image is crisp and precise edge to edge, with no distortion. The quality of a Lambda print is arguably better in terms of clarity, sharpness, and color saturation than other print processes. Al Karim’s images of young women “gagged” by drawing a black shape like a strip of duct tape over their mouths are shown blurred, other than for their startlingly clear blue eyes. These images are powerful metaphors for a society that may have perfect clarity of knowledge about itself but is unwilling or unable to cure itself of its ills.
Green Art Gallery was one of the first galleries to exhibit Arab art in Dubai. Their presentation of an installation by the important Syrian artist Buthayna Ali was the best-realized and most challenging work in the Fair. The work, entitled I’m Ashamed, consists of an entire room filled with 700 small (12 x 20 cm; 5 x 8 ins.) black-and-white photographs, printed on plastic, that were hung suspended from the ceiling in rows that started high at the front of the room and sloped down to the floor at the back.
A network of down-lights shone tightly focused beams onto each individual image and projected its shadow onto the floor and onto the audience whenever they entered the room. Every image was of a child of Gaza.
The work was conceived as a response to the recent war on Gaza and deals with the accumulation of emotionally scarring memories and their legacy for all subsequent generations. It also reminds us that even if we are thousands of kilometers away from these events, and see them only as a shadow on our television screens, we, too, cannot help but be touched by them.
Bidoun Projects in association with Galerie Sfeir Semler presented a film by the French-Morrocan artist Yto Barrada entitled The Magician. The film depicts magician Abdelouahid El Hamri (aka Sinbad of the Straits) performing his tricks in the courtyard of his home in Tangier, without fanfare and in front of a shabby black curtain. His performance is a tragicomic masterpiece, especially when he attempts to perform his difficult trick, “How to make a chicken go to sleep,” using a live chicken and a glove puppet, and is spectacularly and hilariously unsuccessful.
The gravitas of his performance is at odds with his unkempt appearance and his makeshift stage but his other illusions actually work, and we find ourselves cheering him on. It seems his best trick is finding success in unexpected quarters.
The Alserkal Cultural Foundation was not included in the roster of galleries participating in the Fair, which is a pity as the art fair map is very helpful when navigating the labyrinthine alleyways of Bastakiya and the space established by Emirati collector Ahmad Bin Eisa Al Serkal focuses on young local Dubai artists. The space consists of a series of small rooms around a large central courtyard with each artist having their own room.
Ali Al Janahi showed a series of delicately toned, washed-out landscapes all featuring mirages as a distinctive feature of the Emirati landscape, while Ali Al Sharif showed images of quiet corners and empty alleys in an old part of town that displayed none of the outward glitz, kitsch, or crass bad taste of modern Dubai.
Mohamad Almarzougi showed a series of photographs of clouds at high altitude taken from a plane, while Ahmad Almarzougi used a long exposure to focus on the patterns etched by stars on the night sky as the earth rotates beneath them. Jassim Alawahdi treated his room as an installation comprising photographs, mirrors, wire sculptures, and duct tape to make a work entitled Amazingly, Anything might become an Evidence.
The Barasti House was used for the first time this year to host a number of individual artists and galleries. Mark Pilkington is a British artist who moved to the UAE in 1997 to teach at the American University of Sharjah. He is his own subject in his photographic series entitled Working the Desert, which depicts him alone in a bleak, hostile, empty environment. In one image he is trudging through the desert, kicking up the dust, while a small dust-cloud hangs above him, most likely having just been flung by him into the air.
The dust and his posture combine to convey a sense of despondency. In another image he is shoveling the sand furiously and throwing up a storm. His work makes reference to the transformation of the region into a city of the future but also suggests it is an exercise in futility.
Janet Bellotto is an artist, writer, and curator from Toronto and is currently teaching at Zayed University in Dubai. Interlace is a lenticular photograph that morphs from an image of a woman in a traditional burqa to a decorative pattern that is made from several photographic sources from architectural details of El Hambra in Spain to the skyline of Dubai.
Also some of the borders within the image use the words “Endless Ocean” and “Ocean” from a poem by Ibn al-Rumi. Lenticular photography is the perfect medium for this work as its eye-catching animation from figure to pattern and its intermediate states is itself a metaphor for the rapid pace of change within the region and its impact on local culture.
For the Bastakiya Art Fair the Jam Jar Gallery in Dubai teamed up with Grey Noise Gallery in Lahore to present a range of contemporary artists from Pakistan in the Barasati House. One of the most effective works was one of the simplest. A small, scratchy speaker mounted on the wall made rather tinny sounds. A text explained that this work by Lala Rukh, entitled Subh-e-umeed (The Dawn of Hope) was based on recordings made during anti-government demonstrations by lawyers.
In 2007, lawyers were at the forefront of demonstrations against the government of the then President Pervez Musharraf, who sacked dozens of senior judges in a bid to head off legal challenges to his rule. The sounds being made by the speaker brought to mind the old saying about the squeaky wheel getting the oil—just as persistent clamor for change may at times help to bring that change about.
Ayse Turgut Gallery from New York presented a range of work by Turkish and Middle-Eastern artists who are all currently based in the United States. Many of these works appropriated elements from both cultures. Soody Sharifi showed work that is based on 16th-century miniature painting and illuminated books.
These works, comprising digital collage on silk, have the intricacy and clarity of the originals, together with their narrative verve, but are placed in a contemporary setting. Helen Zughaib, on the other hand, drew on the works of Roy Lichtenstein and Piet Mondrian in her gouache paintings of Arabic women.
The exhibition The Best of Saatchi Online’s Middle Eastern Artists smacks of hyperbole as the Saatchi website is an open forum and anyone anywhere could, if they wanted to, make a selection of individual artists and call it their “best of.” In the current group, selected by Saatchi correspondent Ana Finel Honigman, is a group of mixed-media paintings by Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnassar Gharem. His works are all from a series entitled Restored Behavior and comprise industrial lacquer paint on a ground made up of tens of thousands of rubber stamps of Arabic and English text laid down on board.
His Concrete II depicts two isolated segments of a crash barrier while his Pedestrian Crossing II depicts the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center being impacted by planes. His title refers to the fact that his composition in dark gray, pale gray, and yellow could, at first glance, be seen as a detail of a nondescript section of road.
Lettering was also the basis of a presentation in Dubai by the Khatt Foundation that was established in Amsterdam in 2004 to promote Arabic typography and design in the Arab world. The exhibition in Dubai showcased work in progress from the Foundation’s City V2.0 Project, which matches Arab and Dutch designers and their ideas on how text and lettering in public can enhance a sense of space.
They may have their work cut out for them in Bastakiya. There is no signage anywhere in Bastakiya and so it is very easy to get lost but that is a part of its charm.
Reprinted with kind permission of Asian Art News. Copyright (c) Asian Art Press (International) Limited 2009.
