Art and national Identity

Before I came to the UAE I knew there were at least 10 Emirati artists. I had their names and images in a book published in 1982 by the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States. However, on arrival in Dubai I faced a major problem - there was no National Museum or Art Gallery so no obvious place to find them. It actually took me six months to find a local artist but it is amazing that just over a year later, I am now aware of more than 200 and have actually seen the work of well over 50.

In Dubai until October 6th is an unprecedented government sponsored exhibition featuring over 100 works by 22 local artists. The artists range from veteran painters to a new generation of photographers and graphic designers. There are also literally second-generation artists such as the son and daughter of the UAEs most well known artist Abdul Qader Al Rais.

The conservative tendency in visual arts has been an association with ‘heritage’ as a means of defining identity, generally meaning falcons, dates, horses and camels. A younger and more global generation is obviously rather less enamoured of this limiting image of the nation and ‘nationality’ in art seems rather antithetical to the contemporary international climate anyway. So it was very interesting to see how much would emerge from this show that was distinctly ‘Emirati’.

The venue is the classically styled Bastakiya villa no 69. The first works you see are by Reem Al Ghaith and are familiar from the Dubai Next show at Art Basel. There is a palpable sense of dislocation in her three huge prints of a solitary figure inside a frame or seemingly reflected in a mirror against a backdrop of various Dubai locations. They also make an impression by sheer virtue of their size despite being obscured by several stone pillars. So the initial impact of this show is clearly Emirati.

The only other works in the courtyard itself are nine small sculptures of animals and figures made out of scrap metal by Mohammed Abdullah. With the exception of one in the shape of a mosque, these could have been done anywhere, as could the abstract paintings of Ahmed Sharif and Mohammad Al Qassab in room one. Four collages by Ali al Adnan were definitively regional featuring historical cultural figures from the Gulf including one Emirati. Accompanying these were Karima Al Shomeily's very direct photographs of partially obscured female faces which also had a very local flavour.

In the next two rooms, Khalid Al Banna’s work with its contrasting textures and shades of black, white and grey and Alia Al Shamsi’s photographs of modern mannequins and mechanical fortune-tellers addressed aesthetic universalities. However, Khalid Mezaina’s quirky graphics epitomising a fun and funky side of contemporary Dubai were a great example of modern generational sensibilities. Mohammed Al Habtoor also picked up on this feeling but without making a specific visual connection to the locality. His big cartoon faces suggested Disney on acid to me but provoked much discussion and were very popular with the younger generation. He will be having his first solo show when this one is over.

Similarly, Summaya Al Suwaidi’s photographic images contained nothing distinctly local in content but did seem to be staking a claim for some kind of new local genre of their own. UAE gothic perhaps? The unsettling atmosphere in Lateefa Maktoum’s consumate study of perspective could also fit this category.

Farid al Rais, daughter of the UAE’s most famous artist Abdul Qader al Rais had five works in the show - two large acrylics and three smaller pieces traditional in style if not wholly in content. Her brother Musab al Rais also had five large painted works in a different room. Both are influenced by their father’s work to the extent that all I can see is variations on his earlier themes but I guess this makes them second generation practitioners of a pioneering local style!

Of the other work in the show that connected physically to the locale, Alya al Sanad’s faces covered in sand are sensual and intense while photographs of vague figures taken through a dirty windscreen are like stills from a UAE road movie that hasn’t been made yet. In one of four video works Khalil Abdul Wahid filmed a short journey through his windscreen with visibility so bad at times due to fog or rain, that I’m sure he was risking a serious accident. It was quite a relief when he put the windscreen wipers on. Along his route there were several turnoffs for Sharjah, all of which he avoided - I guess he didn’t want to make a traffic movie.

There are two more rooms and six other artists in this show who I haven't even mentioned here including two who featured in the Meem Gallery Summer Exhibition and two exhibiting for the first time. So there is more to be seen and a lot more to be said. Overall the show demonstrates that local artists are creating very diverse work bearing little relation to the traditionally favoured images of the past, and are interpreting and revealing a very different present. They are essentially producing what will be the creative ‘heritage’ of the UAE in a few decades time. However, it is unlikely that you will be able to chart these developments by walking into a single public institution any time soon. Considering that you will be able to walk into a Louvre and a Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi and a Berlin State Museum in Dubai, this is a national tragedy.

Another tragedy, or perhaps mystery, is that despite the official support for this show there has been very little publicity and no information seems to be available on the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority website or indeed anywhere else. Hopefully, there will at least be a few other reviews before it closes on October 6th .... maybe prompted by Dubai Eye's Siobhan Live which did an hour long segment about this show on September 22nd!

• 'Suhoor, an Emirati Exhibition'
• House 69, Bastakiya District,
• Until October 6th

Roads Were Open / Roads were Closed

The advantage of being unemployed is time. September marks the beginning of the post summer season and all the galleries have new shows so I may get to see them all this year!

I started a few days ago with a trip the Third Line showing its war themed exhibition ‘Roads were Open / Roads were Closed’. This exhibition features five artists interpreting either direct or indirect experience of the Palestinian and Lebanese conflicts. The exhibition’s focus is on exploring how we register trauma and perceive conflict. However, the work is also very much about how artists interpret history and preserve or package national and political, as well as personal memory.

As you enter the gallery, Palestinian Layla Shawwa’s ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ is a striking start. The huge slingshot complete with large stone sitting on a stand in the middle of the gallery floor is an immediately recognisable symbol of military asymmetry and moral triumph. The piece and its ironic title acknowledge this standard interpretation but Layla Shawwa’s point is more complex. In the absence of any forward movement, the symbol now stands as an impotent victim of its own mythology. It becomes a memory around which an uneasy internal dialogue revolves rather than being the external symbol of strength that it once was.

Photographer Tarek Al Ghoussein is also Palestinian but born in Kuwait and living in the UAE. As a consequence he is not directly exposed to the conflict but still needs to process and interpret his connection to it. His photographs, all taken in the UAE, depict huge and featureless concrete walls reflecting both the reality of the Palestinian situation and his inaccessibility to that reality. He also photographs barren desert spaces sometimes juxtaposing the two themes. When placing himself in the images he is inevitably dwarfed, either by space or by containment.

Fouad El Khoury documents a month of his life in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 when Beirut came under serious bombardment following the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. The technique is a series of prints that show his diary page for each day. Sometimes the whole page is situated inside his house surrounded by the normalcy of household items. Other times the text is superimposed on events taking place outside the house, sometimes images familiar from news reports during that period. At the same time as news of what is happening in the nation is reported in his diary, a parallel tragedy is unfolding in his personal life as a relationship fails which makes a nice if obvious juxtaposition of the personal and the political. The whole photo series covers an entire wall of the gallery and makes an impact as both visual and emotional archive.

A very different approach is taken by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige whose multi part project ‘Wonder Beirut’ documents the earlier civil war period using the ‘Story of the Pyromaniac Photographer’. This was Abdallah Farah, a photographer commissioned by the Lebanese tourist board to take postcard images of Beirut in the late 1960s. With the onset of the civil war in 1975, he systematically burned or altered the slides and negatives he used for the postcards to reflect the damage of battle. This results in some fantastic images with parts melted and blackened but retaining postcard colour intensity at the same time. Others such as the ‘Battle of the Hotels’ show sequences of the same postcard image gradually being destroyed.

Another part of the project relates to Abdallah Farah’s many rolls of film, which were never developed, first because of a lack of materials and then out of choice. Each roll is carefully dated, some as recently as 2000, and their contents documented so you are able to read the images but not see them. This part of the project is called ‘Latent Images’. Latency is apparently an engineering term meaning the time delay between the initiation of an action and its results. So the consequences of the action remain unobserved in the present. An exhibition about conflict seems the perfect home for such a notion!

This show runs until October 2nd. Thanks to the Third Line Gallery and artists for the images used here.

Ramadan Kareem

I have spent the entire day so far feeling quite irrationally happy. This is very pleasant indeed and rare for me in Dubai. I can't remember the last time I had a day like this. It's irrational because there is no obvious reason for it... I didn't win any money, get a new job or sell a painting and it's the wrong time of the month for any extreme hormonal tendencies

That said I think it may have actually started yesterday at around 3.00 in the afternoon when I felt the earthquake. Having lived in Japan for a long time I knew what it was immediately. Once I realised that it was just going to be a nice gentle little shake I started grinning from ear to ear and thoroughly enjoyed it. This may seem like a weird reaction to potential death and destruction but what can I do?

At the time of the quake I was writing my first exhibition review since being back. Having written nothing for over two months it was very hard work and I didn't actually finish it until 10.00pm. It's a review of Roads were open/Roads were closed which is at the Third Line Gallery until October 2nd. I will post it here shortly but from tomorrow it will be up on the US arts site Absolute Arts.

I just hope that this feeling continues for a while longer because however irrational it may be it's still happiness!

The Grinch who stole my job…

I now know how I feel about being back and it ain’t good! On Monday morning I discovered that my part time job that became a full time job and then went back to a part time job has now become a no time job. Yes… I am now officially unemployed.

Although I'm happy with the job I did and can console myself with valuable insight gained into the chaotic and brutal nature of local cultural politics, it still sucks! I am now back to square one contemplating the work search all over again except with zero enthusiasm for any further contribution to this voracious and slightly schizophrenic machine!

As if this didn’t make the first day of Ramadan 2008 memorable enough, I discovered Monday evening that my purse had disappeared. The only explanation was that I’d dropped it in a taxi so I called the lost property office of all the cab companies in Dubai to register the loss that evening. The following morning I called them all again but no purse had been found so I then called the bank to cancel my cards. It came as quite a shock when the bank informed me that a cab driver had already called and cancelled them for me! Unfortunately, the bank had taken no record of the cab drivers phone number, name or cab company. So I know that a cab driver found my purse. I know that he was honest and kind enough to cancel my cards even though I find that a little bizarre. So I called the cab companies back and informed them of this development but still none of them had my purse.

So what does this mean? That the companies are lying? That the cab driver cancelled my cards but for some bizarre reason kept my purse? Very frustrating knowing that your purse is out there with no way of getting it back. There wasn’t much money in it - there’s never much money in it - but it is those little personal things that are the real loss.

The only thing that is good right now is that I have been asked to participate in an exhibition at the Courtyard Gallery in November. Beyond that I have no idea but if anyone can point me in the direction of the Bur Dubai dole office I’d appreciate it!

The Dubai Stone and other weighty matters

I just got back to Dubai after spending much more time away than planned ... just like last year! This time it was the unexpected death of my Aunt which caused the delay and mostly because of the customary two week wait for the funeral which I have always found appalling. I am totally with the Muslims on this one... white shroud and in the ground within 48 hours. Still, at least she was in the illustrious company that week of Alexander Solzhenitsyen, Mahmoud Darwish and Isaac Hayes!

The rest of the trip took in Southern England, Wales and Berlin and was a much needed shut off from just about everything.... especially the sun! It rained and rained and the immersion in infinite shades of grey and green not only made me feel normal again, it also improved my eyesight. I do miss the ocularly restful colours of a gloomy climate! Unfortunately my back muscles made it known that they are rather keener on the climate here.

Anyway, on arrival in the UK I weighed myself for the first time in a year to discover the absolute truth of the Dubai stone. I have put on exactly one stone (6.35kg) since last August and so has spouse. Despite being told by everyone at home that I looked better I am not happy because it makes my existing clothes uncomfortably tight and I hate shopping! It means I can no longer avoid a special trip to the mall for real shopping rather than cinema, meeting people or just getting out of the heat for while.

Am not sure how I feel about being back here yet but did think I'd got off at the wrong place when I saw the papers were full of local corruption stories. What is going on??? Dubai Summer surprises certainly wasn't like this last year!

Picasso in Abu Dhabi

At the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi until September is the Arab world's first public exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso. Borrowed from the collection at the Musée National Picasso in Paris, the retrospective show features examples of all styles and periods and features 186 paintings, sculptures and works on paper.

I have not really through about Picasso for years. The fact that I can still visualize most of the well known pieces from various periods has resulted in a smug assumption of familiarity that almost meant I didn't bother going to this show. This would have been criminal because this show was an absolute revelation. Seeing such a range of work mostly unfamiliar to me was like seeing a completely different artist and given my own accumulation of years the way in which I perceived the work was also completely different.

The show was hung in chronological order starting with a blue self-portrait from 1901. Most of this early work was figurative including several studies on paper for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’. There is perhaps a compositional shadow of Van Gogh in the earthy 'Landscape with Two Figures from 1908 and a sculptural influence is already evident especially in a small triptych of three very solid looking heads.

The next section loosely covered the 1920s. The paintings got larger and were mostly of figures in various poses and settings including two unfinished portraits in conventional style, which seemed to have been abandoned half way through. A sense of boredom with these kinds of conventions was reflected in other figures that seemed to become gradually chunkier and more imposing. The most interesting was ‘Seated Woman’ from 1920 which appeared to have started off with at least some classical intentions but by the end the hands and feet were grossly exaggerated and distorted and suddenly the suggestion of a radical change was there. This was also the case with 'Reading the Letter' from 1921. I then went back and looked at the hands and feet of all the other figures finally concluding that an additional motivation for immersion in the joys of human abstraction was because Picasso wasn't very good at painting hands and feet.

The next section covering the 1930s had a huge mix of seated and abstracted female figures, which gradually become more angular as the decade progressed. This use of colour and style in this section were definitely the most familiar like 'Reading' from 1932 although I was amazed at just how much there was. The output in this period seemed to have been more prodigious than at any other time and one big surprise for me was that he seemed to spend the entirety of 1931 doing bronze sculptures of large and distorted heads with hugely exaggerated noses. I had no idea so much of this work existed.

One of the exceptions to all studies of sitting, standing, reclining and general other women was 'Bullfight: Death of a Female Toreador' from 1933. The dramatic and sensual intertwining of bullfighter, horse and bull with a violent end assured for at least one of them was probably the most powerful picture in the show.

Perhaps understandably, there was not much work here from the 1940s. The rate seems to slow down dramatically, the colours turn darker, the motifs spikier and several skulls also make an appearance.

The next surprise was ‘Massacre in Korea’ from 1951, its dramatic impact, enhanced by a compositional layout seemingly borrowed from Manet’s “The execution of Maximillian”. The ubiquitously reproduced image of Guernica has so defined Picasso in relation to war that it was fascinating to see an image referencing a different conflict.

There was not so much work from the 50s and 60s either but what was there suggested a revisitation and amalgamation of the past with some homages – one to Manet and possibly one to Matisse. There was also a one picture with abstracted though explicit female genitalia which I am surprised made it past the censors!
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One of the final pieces was 'The Young Painter' from 1972 and the childlike simplicity of this painting is a marked contrast to the rest of the show. It's directness makes a big emotional impact and it was hard not to wonder if this was Picasso revisiting a very early version of himself. Apparently it was painted only a few months before his death in 1973 so I guess it is a very appropriate image to end with.

The endless hoops ...

Anticipating a full time income I have recently been taking more taxis than normal. This has provided mixed experiences but the saddest was a 23 year old Pakistani on his 5th day of driving who broke down in tears when telling me about his family. He is having such a bad time he has told his brother not to even think about coming and has told to warn others against it too.

Another driver of 10 years spent the entire journey giving a fascinatingly detailed account of the pros and cons of every vehicle he has driven in those years concluding with an unequivocal recommendation for the Toyota Corrolla. This obviously carries weight because when you start looking out for them Toyota Corrollas are everywhere.

Strangely, in the past month I have had not one but three different drivers quoting the section in the Quran that presages the end of days. 'When towers rise out of the desert and touch the sky etc ... ' plus global disasters and other bits of Quranic evidence that the shit will hit the fan shortly. By taxi driver number three I thought it politic to be convinced and actually started throwing in a few similar biblical references for good measure. It's quite cathartic when you're having a bad day and all three drivers seemed almost pleased about the imminent end except one who wanted to clear his debts first.

However, these fascinating conversations will have to stop because I have hit a number of related bureaucratic snags resulting in my application to work full time being rejected by the Ministry of Labour.

The first snag is that I don't have a stamped and certified copy of my degree certificate. In fact the last time I actually saw my degree certificate was about 15 years ago when it was consigned to a box in the loft while moving house. Given that my multifarious skills are obvious from my CV it never occurred to me that I would need to prove I graduated. To add insult to injury I have been informed that my university does not even appear on their list of registered universities.

Another problem is that they want references from my previous employers. I have been self employed for 10 years so I don't have former employers, at least not recent ones. However, I am now trying to track some of them down so far without success. I have had what is now apparently known as a 'portfolio career' which is a nice name for a somewhat meandering career path that only makes sense to its owner. Despite fact that I have all the requisite skills for the job my CV is a tricky one to explain in this part of the world.

Abdullah Al Muharraqi at MEEM Gallery

At the MEEM Gallery you can see a retrospective of the Gulf’s best-known artist Abdullah al Muharraqi, 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 unease 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 the 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! It was a very strange exception but a definite reminder that propaganda rarely makes good art.

Mushroom Blancmange

I am starting a full time job in June and am already having doubts. The two days I currently work are spent in several frustrating ways. Figuring out how to nail down blancmange in zero gravity seems to have become the overall project. I draft invitations and requests for information which elicit no response and I send emails containing crucial questions about the nature of blancmange development which never get answered.

I mostly sit in a vacuum watching time and my intellectual faculties slip away. 'Why am I here?' I ask myself repeatedly. If something concrete to do does appear I get as excited as a laboratory rat when somebody rattles the food pipe, but invariably it ends in tragedy (farce, if my pride manages to stay above it!).

It wasn't like this at the beginning. In fact, I think it was my linguistic dexterity that gave the blancmange recipe credibility in the first place. So I guess you could argue that I've brought it on myself. However, I did not expect to be subsequently mushroomed. I am now left completely in the dark and not even fed shit! No wonder a recent regional employment survey found job satisfaction in the UAE was extremely low!

Spare Change

First of all I would like to thank everyone who has emailed over the last few weeks noting with concern the increasingly jaundiced perspective, telling me to hang in there or just reminding me that they love me :).

Here's a little traffic incident which happened on my way to Trade Centre a few days back. I looked out of the bus window and could see straight down into a huge black Bentley. At the first set of lights the driver reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a huge stack of 500 dirham notes. He sat in his car counting the bundle, kissed it and placed it on the passenger seat. At the next set of lights he reached into the glove compartment again, pulled out another stack, counted it, kissed it and placed it next to the other one.

He turned off at the next set of lights so I'll never know how many stacks of cash were in that glove compartment. I couldn't see his face either so he could have been from anywhere. I cannot imagine seeing something like this stuck in a traffic jam anywhere else and it was mesmerising - like watching a scene from a movie.

• 
  As a postscript to the vision fatigue theme two posts ago I am now on 'vision watch'. The latest was in Trade Centre today: "Nakheel - Where vision inspires humanity".
  
  'Vision' is the word round these parts but the regularity with which it is now being used has rendered it completely meaningless and possibly constitutes language abuse......
  
  Another postscript actually.... I don't tend to take things too personally but if anybody comes across a German speaking, Ferrari driving, cement trader in his 40s who thinks all locals are bastards (despite a recent invitation from Mr. A. Sheikh to his private polo club) tell him he's a tosser. He really needs to know!