Chinartree

Space Invaders - VideoAppart - March 2010

By Kevin Jones

Mamia Breteche is a small, plucky woman with a very big car. The Dubai-based curator of VideoAppart, an international biennial of video art, has spent the past few months four-wheel-driving around town with an AV-nerd’s dream-stash of projection equipment.  

“I want to push people to go out of their way to discover video art,” she declares as we trundle into American University Dubai (AUD). “They need to interact with it, not be frozen in front of a screen in a gallery.” This understated rivalry with the traditional gallery space is at the very heart of VideoAppart’s raison d’etre.

Now in its third edition, VideoAppart has a double objective: to showcase artists’ videos simultaneously in Paris and a selected “twin” city (Dubai in 2010), while challenging the traditional modes of viewing them.  The second half of the name, ‘Appart,’ comes from the French for apartment, which is where most of the art is presented – in private spaces. 

Sadly in Dubai, the private-space model did not pan out too well.  Lugging a monitor into the AUD rotunda, Mamia bemoans: “Three apartments! What can I do with three apartments?” Whilst this may be the case (and much of the work has ended up in galleries and institutions like AUD) the few pieces that have crept into individual homes are nonetheless sowing the seeds of a polemic that rattles existing art-viewing infrastructure. 

Projects such as VideoAppart raise questions about modes of exhibition and art’s relation to the space in which it is shown.  For example, how did the UAE become so firmly entrenched in the European gallery style of exhibition spaces with their parade of neat ID wall tags and tell-tale red dots, soon to be joined by the looming museum-behemoths and their institutional messaging? Are these sacrosanct models really our only art-viewing options?

If VideoAppart succeeds in evoking a new mode of exhibition, even temporarily, it is largely due to its particular medium. Listening to a host spout out anecdotes on his paintings or sculptures plants you on the receiving end of a status/power discourse.  Huddle around a video-screen with complete strangers, however, and you soon realize that video is the perfect medium to drive the point of sharing (literally) home. 

“It’s all about human exchange, communication, conviviality,” exclaims Mamia.  Video Appart, for better or worse, rides the rising tide of user-generated everything, providing a welcoming outlet for whole networks of armchair curators.

And what about the perception of the art itself?  Does this change when art is shown in a private setting? Exhibiting art in private spaces is nothing new, as decades of artists’ studio visits can attest.

Yet, it could be said that the studio is the very cerebral cortex of authorial intention (vs textual intention) which makes an objective appreciation, let alone analysis, of the art virtually impossible.  Can the informal domestic setting, and the multiple viewing opportunities it enables, seriously drive attention to a work? Or, as Boris Groys would argue, does the context simply secularize the viewing conditions, potentially undermining the Benjamin-ian “aura” of the work as art?

Video art, traditionally the mainstay of public rather than private collections, is nearly absent from Dubai galleries, which cater primarily to a non-institutional clientele. Some sources (like Canvas’s daily sales round-up reports throughout Art Dubai, and Breteche herself) indicate that private collectors are starting to nibble at the video art bait.

It is unlikely that alternative viewing formats like VideoAppart fuel this trend. Yet in the fast-forward growth spree of Dubai’s gallery scene, echoed by the overnight sprouting of four world-class museums in Abu Dhabi, perhaps experimental exhibition forms should be welcomed, as of now, as viable alternatives to the reigning duo of commercial and institutional space.

Her 16-channel installation at AUD complete, the tireless Mamia hoists herself back into her mammoth car. Although this is the final week of VideoAppart Dubai, she proudly boasts of an invitation to showcase 15 of her 46 artists in Rome in May. Through an ironic twist of fate, the invitation did not stem from some Italian fringe movement, but from MAXXI, the upcoming Zaha Hadid-designed national museum of XXI century arts.

A sell out to the museum establishment she has laboured so doggedly to challenge? “Absolutely not!” she roars over the revving engine. Fittingly, Mamia’s MAXXI installation will be a video appetizer for a larger show on a theme she knows all too well – space.