Damn Daman

We have just had to renew our Daman health insurance.

After protracted negotiations last October we thought that I had been granted a year's insurance exempt from maternity cover because we can't have children. However last week we discovered that we had actually paid the full amount including maternity for just six months.
This was a shock because according to the document I was covered until October BUT when we looked closely at my health card the expiry date was the same as spouse's insurance taken out 6 months before mine!

We protested to no avail and were then told to pay up for both of us including the extra 3000DHS maternity cover. We said we didn't need the maternity cover but were then asked if we could prove it. Well... no we can't... sensitive issues like fertility test results are given in person rather than certificated but spouse said he would take a test here too if that was the only way.

Oh No... said Daman ... it's about your wife. You may have a problem but she can still get pregnant therefore she has to have maternity cover. Unless she has had a hysterectomy, maternity cover is compulsory until she's 50.

Stunned silence....

So how am I going to get pregnant then?? By divine fucking intervention?? Or am i just supposed to be a total slut?

I suppose they are not actually thinking at all. It's just a bureaucratic requirement and cases to which it does not apply are negligible enough to be ignored. So on top of the absurdity of the issue itself, we still have to pay for a service that is irrelevant and waste 3000DHS in a situation where money is still really tight ... . it almost makes me wish I was slut.

Vision Fatigue

The latest vision is the one for Bastakia. I wrote an article for Nafas online arts magazine a couple of weeks ago which talked about this and also looked at potential problems. The major one as always is human resources. Who is going to organise, administrate and implement all the projects and plans.

The other big cultural visions are Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island development and the Khor Project in Dubai. Cultural weight is also thrown around by the ability to employ people like Rem Koolhaas, to design whole new cities. Nakheel's Waterfront City is one such project and even has its own death star presumably to match Emaar's death spire.Abu Dhabi has the super ironic Masdar carbon free city and the daily onslaught of advertisements for other developments is really starting to get on my nerves. The Gulf News has given up any pretense of being a newspaper since someone had the bright idea of turning the front page into an advert. 'Be an Octavian' What? Buy a piece of San Francisco / Spanish Reality ... . er.. earth to Dynasty Zarooni - this is the UAE! Even Ajman's getting in on the act with 'visionaries are those who make their dreams come true ... dare to envision' etc. etc. yawn yawn. Is there no one who can still see clearly enough to consider taking a rain check on the word 'vision'?

It is particularly grating in a week where there has been so much talk about national identity and the demographic imbalance including a debate on the UAE Community blog that had more than 90 comments.

I sympathise with the local predicament - it took me 6 months to find a local! However, if there is such great concern about demographic imbalance why all the new cities? Who are they for? All those people who will have to come to implement the other visions I guess!

PS When my subscription to Gulf Property Advertising (formerly News) expires, I'm switching to the National.

Personality Disintegration

I have now been in Dubai for almost a year and am starting to miss various things that it never occurred to me I could miss... the 16th and 17th centuries for example. By this I mean the ability to walk into a public institution and spend time in the company of some old masters of the Italian renaissance perhaps or some ancient artefacts looted from elsewhere at some point in perfidious British history. However, this is probably a result of relentless exposure to 'contemporary' art over the past month or so.

Another problem I have is the constant feeling that I'm living in some kind of a time warp. With the exception of a few key local programmes radio stations sound like British provincial radio in the 1970s. I have actually given up turning on the radio when I'm cooking dinner in the evening because its either endless sports talk or people who seem to know very little about music history talking bullshit about dreadful playlists! The TV is even worse. Maybe its bad timing but City 7 only seems to show re-runs of Minder.

All of this is turning me a bit radical and is doing very strange things to my sense of humour. The comedy channel for me is Saudi Channel 2. There's usually a laugh within five minutes. This may sound like some kind of orientalist-laughing-at-the-arabs type bullshit but it is truly fascinating and the 10 o' clock news is most informative unlike any local news services. I can no longer get through 8.30 - 9.00 on Dubai One without wanting to blow my own head off.

I am also getting concerned that my personality is disintegrating. I am getting more and more of those days where I am actually losing track of my own identity. I guess this happens without access to people who've known you for years and years and can remind you of who you are. The other identity indicators are the books, pictures and just general 'stuff' that I've accumulated over the years, all of which remains in the UK. I did not realise how much identity was maintained simply by being able to idly glance over my bookshelves once a day or just stare at a favourite painting. Thank god I'd put most of my music collection on an MP3 player! That precious little device is currently constituting about 75% of my sanity.

Do you think I need a holiday????????

Never again ...

Last month I was asked to write four articles about art in Dubai for the website of a London based organisation called Art Review. When the offer came I was delighted. Somebody was actually offering to pay me for writing this shit ?? Brilliant!

Of course it isn't that simple and the past month has put me off writing for money ever again. First this was a very casual arrangement. No contract. No clear brief and a suggested word count that was half the size of what was necessary.

Then there was the editorial problem. When the person who commissions the articles really wants to be doing it themselves, there is an inevitable editorial imposition of their view, which at times differed considerably from mine. This was particularly acute when changes made seemed to play to certain prejudices while I assumed the articles were there to inform these otherwise.

Another difficulty which was actually a shock to me was realising the extreme western-centric view of what is happening here in terms of art and culture. At one point this resulted in an editorial insertion about what constituted 'progress' which I had to ask to be removed.

To be fair the first two articles were not too bad but tensions crept in at number 3 and by number 4 I just wanted it to be over. Also number 4 was about Art Dubai which was the least interesting for me to write. A big contemporary art fair is a big contemporary art fair wherever it's held. Apart from the flamboyant, dubious, paranoid or just plain weird people that can turn up on preview nights, they are a bit like sales conferences. I wasn't crazy about them in London so the interest value here is only in terms of Art Dubai's relationship with what is happening on the ground and how it contributes to other non commercial development. Of course nobody here seems aware of the notion of non-commercial development but I realise this is my problem and that everybody except me actually embraces this reality! I am trying to change my attitude! I am also trying to accept that 'press release' and 'newspaper report' are synonymous... but that's a tough one too ...

Art Dubai

Art Dubai held at Madinat Jumeirah is only in its second year but has almost doubled in size. How very Dubai of it! I think it should really be held at Trade Centre because it does have the feel of a trade conference but I guess they can’t force art dealers and collectors to chow down at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf minus al kahool!

There are around 70 galleries taking part from everywhere but the most memorable were the Korean Pyo gallery which had some wacky and surreal paintings of people in urban interiors that said a lot about the psychological effects of rapid change and the modern weirdnesses of interpersonal communication. I just wish I’d taken photos. Brazil’s Bolsa de Arte gallery had a strange collection of subverted Sotheby's magazine covers, carpet aeroplanes and an image that changed as you walked past it. On the art meets science front. the big photos of particle accelerators in the Swiss CERN laboratory by Simon Norfolk were pretty amazing.

Art Dubai has had a phenomenal impact. Last year spawned its fringe - the Creek Art Fair - arts education charity (START) and a UAE arts discussion forum (The Thinking Cloud). This year DIFC launched a whole new ‘Season of Arts’ to coincide with Art Dubai and has a packed schedule of stuff including an installation of giant ants by American Susan P. Cochran. This is a perfect fit for the Dubai vision thing. It’s about civic duty and the whole committed colony co-operating on a large-scale property development.

As we all know reference to any negatives in this happy PR model are rare so I was delighted to see Desperately Seeking Paradise, at the new Pakistan Pavilion at Art Dubai. Huma Mulji’s suitcase installation addresses the dreams of Dubai’s labourers. The suitcase of golden shoes and bread suggests the riches they seek but which they ultimately build for others while the suitcase of showers has a speaker in each shower head, one narrating dreams of employment in Dubai and the other narrating the drawbacks. Seeing this work here gave me hope that there is potential for at least some art to perform the other civic duty of exploring awkward questions.

The Global Art Forums are another element of Art Dubai and the first two days of these looked at Art Patronage in the Business Age. Topics included ‘Building a Corporate Collection’, ‘Working with Corporations’ and ‘Private Passion and Cultural Philanthropy’. The latter strikes me as a bit like carbon offsetting. Pay a little extra to save the planet and feel good about yourself or in this case make a tax free donation to ‘the arts’, feel good about yourself and get your name on the wall of a new institution.

Another project that received a lot of attention was the Credit Suisse ‘Art and Entrepreneurship’ exhibition. This was unveiled to great fanfare at Art Dubai and will go on tour to the ‘art capitals’ of the world shortly. This 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. Sorry??

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. Duvet on a stick anyone? I have problems with calling this art. Isn’t it just product commissioning for an innovative corporate PR campaign?

I did escape the commerce briefly and get some time in a quiet room with some video and hanging plastic people thanks to the Bidoun lounge. This was in the underground Art Park, (formally Car Park) which was a bit like an arcade only with lots of screens showing some excellent video shorts. No price tags or sales negotiation to be seen, only funky cardboard chairs designed by Traffic, free cola and your own personal headphones for you own personal screen. How civilised!

It was only on for a few days so blink and you'd have missed it. The Creek Art Fair is still on however and will be in Bastakia til March 31st. On that night there is a closing concert by Reza Derakshani. Unmissable I'd say!

Creek Art Fair

Ok.... Long time no blog. In a nutshell the panic about our visa is over and we are safe til 2009 .. inshallah. Spouse got some freelance and I am going full time on the arts job from June assuming nobody gets offended by my installation at the Creek Art Fair (above). These four new 'burj' required me saving my trash for months but they do look quite cool so I'm happy. It is also great to be part of the Creek Art fair which takes over the Bastakia from now until March 31st. There is LOADS of fantastic stuff and you get to see the inside of a lot of those old houses that Tatweer deems it unnecessary to open up at any other time of year!

The fair opened on Saturday 15th with traditional UAE dancers and there really was a buzzy festival atmosphere to the whole evening. The narrow streets of the Bastakia were packed and each different art space seemed to have its own little local entourage. The rather more modern tradition of a free bar and DJ on the roof also featured although this was not on the Art Fair map.

Even if U R not that interested in art it is worth going cos there really is something for everyone (except pornographers ... although a nude does appear in one of the video installations ... shhhhh!!!)

DIFC Word into Art

This show is on until April 30th at DIFC and it’s FREE so you have absolutely no excuse not to see it! I first saw the Word into Art exhibition at the British Museum in London in 2006. Although the scope of the exhibition now transported to Dubai is smaller, it was great to see it again. The opening day was accompanied by panels, discussion forums and educational events specifically tailored to the local context so there was a lot more to it than just the exhibition.

Word into Art focuses on how script has been used in Middle Eastern art from the calligraphic traditions of Quranic and poetic verse, through to more innovative and modern manifestations. In the process it demonstrates how script is used to convey a diversity of symbolic, political or purely aesthetic meanings.

The exhibition is in four sections the first of which is ‘Sacred Script’. Given that the Arabic script used today is the same as that in which the Quran was originally revealed there is an inherent religious association with the script. In turn the Quranic text itself then prompted a major development of the written language into a structured system. Perhaps because of this there is a common assumption that all Arabic calligraphy constitutes verses from the Quran. However, this completely overlooks the rich poetic tradition in the Arabic speaking world and much of the calligraphic representation in this show was from classical poetry.

Interestingly there are a number of different calligraphic styles that developed at different periods of Arabic history. One of them the Nasta’liq was designed by a 15th Century calligrapher, inspired by the sight of geese flying across the sky. The most common is thuluth in which part of each letter slopes, making it more cursive than the block or kufic text, which preceded it. The letter Kun (Be) by Nassar Mansour on the left is very stylised kufic while Ghani Alani’s verses from the pre-Islamic poet Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma on the right are thuluth. The last line of this poem reads: ‘Half of man is his tongue, and the other half is his heart: the rest is only an image composed of blood and flesh’.

There are a number of other styles too and this is quite a contrast to the modern problem of very limited Arabic fonts - most newspapers, websites and software use just one. This problem was the subject of a presentation by the founder of the Khatt Foundation, which initiated a collaborative design project in Holland resulting in the creation of 5 new Arabic fonts (see http://www.khtt.net/)

Section 2 explored the theme of ‘Literature and Art’ and included Farhad Moshiri’s paintings of pots, which are among the most striking images to have come out of Iran in recent years. Inscribing poetry on urns or pots goes back to the medieval Islamic period when a trend developed for uniting material and literary culture. The poem here is by Omar Khayyam and is called Drunken Lover. Intoxication is a common theme in classical poetry but is ambiguous as it also refers to the emotional or spiritual ecstasy of love and faith rather than straight substance abuse. I think Khayyam probably played with this ambiguity more than most, however!

The third section ‘Deconstructing the Word’ featured images made from words or based on letters. This included poetry in three different languages painted onto strips of silk and delicate script painted on bricks! However, I was struck by one particular piece in this section by Lassaad Metoui because of its similarity to Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. The medium was black ink on paper and the choice of word was the Arabic for ‘path’, also a key philosophical concept in the far east and frequently the subject of calligraphic works.

The fourth and final section was ‘History, Politics and Identity’ and used a huge variety of mediums and images. One of these was the dafatir meaning ‘notebook’ in Arabic. The dafatir is an experimental medium of artist books that have emerged from Iraqi artists over the past few years. Hana Malallah’s book is based on the ancient poem ‘The conference of the birds’ by Farid al-Din Attar. This is a mystic tale of enlightenment but in this modern manifestation the book is ripped and the text illegible. Others contain scraps of newspaper, clothing and assorted debris from the street. Some have been partially burned and are displayed open with scorched covers and pages containing only some of the original artist content. What they represent is the profound loss of Iraqi heritage and culture as museums and libraries have been destroyed over the course of the war. Carleton College in Minnesota actually held an exhibition devoted entirely to these kinds of works by Iraqi artists in 2006 (see http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/gallery/dafatir/about/).

Other interesting pieces in this section included Chant Avedissian’s homage to Egypt’s most famous and revered singer, Umm Kalthoum, and prints from Shada Ghadrian interpreting our modern and perhaps merging identities with Ctrl-Alt-Del.

For many more images and info from this show see the BZU Virtual Gallery site: http://virtualgallery.birzeit.edu/tour/exhibition?id=128633

• I will just repeat that this show is on until April 30th at DIFC and it’s FREE so you have absolutely no excuse not to see it ;)

A word from our sponsors..

... and that word is NO!

Although spouse is not sponsored by his soon-to-be-former employer we just discovered that his (and therefore my) visa sponsorship is only valid while he works for that employer. So ... looks like we're fugged .. maybe I could apply for a job on a building site?

So much to do, so little time ..

After a blog absence, two weeks of which was spent in the UK, I am now back in Dubai and have started another part time job on an arts project. This is just as well because we were recently informed that spouse had been fired!

It’s not quite that simple but apparently the funding for his job has been cut and his contract will end at the beginning of March. When I heard the news I was spitting blood and trying to find out if we could sue but close inspection of the contract reveals a complete lack of litigation options. Consequently all I can do is imagine walking into both the Brussels and Washington headquarters of the (soon-to-be-former) employer with a couple of sub machine guns.

What infuriates me is that it took 7 fuggin stressful months to get plugged in here, the upshot being that things had started to fall into place in the few weeks before we got this news. So I was just starting to relax and imagine being able to buy some new knickers rather than watching every dirham go into a bottomless pit, and then this happens.

What kind of moronic organisation relocates a new employee without having guaranteed funding for at least two years?? Then again why were we surprised? There have been problems since the very beginning with spouse's job. The organisation were hopeless at the relocational logistics and have demonstrated a considerable lack of administrative competence on a number of occasions since. Managerially disastrous, agenda driven users living off a reputation built at the expense of their employees and a board of ex-politicos who want to die without having what they did (or didn't do) while in office on their consciences. Oh yes! May curses rain upon them!

Anyway, we have to stay here. We no longer have jobs in the UK to go back to and there's somebody else living in our house! So spouse is looking for freelance and my arts project job could turn full time. In fact the project is morphing in classic Dubai stylee into something of a ‘grand projet’ so quickly that it could become double time!

It is a very exciting project although I am a little wary of a full time job. The last one I had turned me into a malevolent witch with extreme homicidal tendencies. Since then I have engineered a careful and varied self employment regime which maintains sanity, solvency and enough time to be an artist. However, going full time may be the only viable financial option especially now that I may have a spouse to support.

The trip to London was at least paid for by spouse’s (soon-to-be-former) employers. We spent the time raiding the last of our savings for the next rent instalment in Dubai and clearing out my beautiful studio and converting it into a bedroom so we can rent it out. Tragic.

It is still not certain that we will be able to stay. Assuming we can get round the visa issue we should know within six months whether it is financially sustainable or not. In the meantime no new knickers.

Art Dubai, CSR, Arts Education and START!

I wasn't actually in Dubai at this time last year so I missed the first ever Gulf Art Fair. It has now been renamed Art Dubai and although it won't happen until March, I thought I might as well kick off the publicity now! The other new kid on the art fair block is Art Paris-Abu Dhabi which I posted about here.

I have to say that I regard Art Fairs in general as little more than large corporate events at which commodities are exchanged often for vast amounts of money. The growth of international art fairs does reflect an increase in demand but it is also the result of an effective promotion of art as a component of a diversified investment portfolio! Given that a stable market requires a degree of product homogenisation I think the long term effect of this is actually damaging to creativity and originality. It effectively excludes work that does not fit the market model.

Despite this personal gripe, I have to say that I do find art fairs fascinating . The often seriously grim gallery owners, the weird and the wacky who wash up at opening nights and the inevitable background muttering about money laundering are always highly entertaining. So I will definitely be trying to secure another sneaky press pass for Art Dubai in March!

Art Dubai last year did something which made it much more interesting than your average large corporate event. It demonstrated that it had a conscience and promoted its corporate social responsibility (CSR) credentials by making the Al Madad Foundation a major partner. A longstanding affiliation between the fair organisers and the UK based charity was used to raise funds, highlight issues of deprivation and ultimately to launch a brand new programme based in Dubai called START which is:

“ ….an initiative to use the international language of art to heal, educate and enrich the skills and opportunities of children and young adults in devastated areas of the world.”

Essentially START links arts education to social development and serves as one of the only comprehensible means of therapy for children traumatised by conflict. For this reason its initial focus is on the Middle East region, particularly Lebanon and Palestine. One programme is under way in Beirut and there are plans for a programme in the Nahr Al Bared refugee camp.

Local artists are trained to teach the programme so the potential long­-term result is a much stronger connection between art and community and all the benefits that brings in terms of developing local creative expression and arts infrastructure. Given that one of creators of the programme was a huge art fair, there is the added advantage of a permanent link back into an international platform.

Interestingly START is also running projects in Dubai itself. The crazy thing about art and HERE is that the new fairs generate massive publicity, there are galleries sprouting up everywhere and it seems everyone wants a piece of the action. At the same time, there is almost no arts education in the national public school system and local native artists are almost invisible suggesting a danger of exclusion from their own nation’s sudden creative boom!

An awareness of this dilemma is beginning to take shape and START is ahead of the game where it has already run a few workshops involving local artists teaching local children in Dubai. It has also run programmes for children with special needs and for the Dubai Autism Centre including exhibitions of their work in cafes and other public spaces.

Hopefully, arts education can develop if an accessible skills base appears .. ... and it will be good for the artists to get out more!!