So Farewell then UAE ...

Well... this it is.... we depart the People's Great Jumhurriyah of Sharjah today then spend some time in Dubai with friends before disappearing into the grey clouds of British summertime.

It is hard to believe that two years have passed quite so quickly even if time does go faster as you get older (a proven scientific fact). It has been a mixed experience but we end up leaving with a relatively good UAE story. After a disastrous start (due in large part to spouse's crisis-engineering employers) we have now managed to recoup our early Dubai losses. I guess we were just ahead of the curve and had our financial crisis about a year before everybody else. As a consequence we are now well into economic recovery although this is largely thanks to Sharjah and means that we don't have to panic about looking for jobs for a few months. So we will just chill out and settle slowly back into the London house and do very little except the basic manual labour associated with long overdue house and garden maintenance.

I will also be able to think about my own art! The constant pressure to earn money here was just not conducive to artistic output. In two years I produced four average prints, reworked some old paintings and created four towers of trash. Ironically (or perhaps not!) it was the Towers of Trash that gave me two of the highlights of my time here - exhibiting at the Creek Art Fair in Dubai and then at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi. Three of them live on - one is now in Germany, one in Ethiopia and the final one has found a loving home in the Environmental Sciences department of the American University of Sharjah!

Another real highlight was working on the Sharjah Biennale which gave me a lot to think about creatively on so many different levels. I have blatantly stolen ideas about processes, materials, concepts and ways of communicating that I will take back to the UK with me and present as my own! I don’t yet know exactly how this and all my experiences over the past two years will come out in my creative work. However, the best thing is that I go back to the UK knowing I have a rare period ahead of me where I simultaneously have the two key commodities of time AND money! This means that I can sift through it all at leisure in my own space and then just focus on externalisation and production. I have (mostly) enjoyed being a facilitator, promoter and reviewer of other peoples art and culture over the past two years BUT I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to just being an artist for a while again!!

I will keep up this blog especially if I see or do anything that relates to the UAE when I am in London or elsewhere. If I get to Venice before November I'll write about the (Dis)United Arab Emirates Pavilion and will obviously post any new UK Dubai bashing articles on the UAE Community Blog :). I also have no doubt that I will now start hearing stories from Pakistani taxi drivers in London who have cousins in Dubai all of whom I will obviously have met ........

Scraps at Total Arts gallery

As we all know one of the most sublimely beautiful areas in Dubai is Al Quoz - grimy, dusty, mechanical and packed with warehouses, factories, storage depots, wholesale outlets and galleries!

As we all also know there are risks to living in an industrial zone and reports of warehouse fires are frequent. The most damaging one in March last year caused a massive explosion and fire resulting in several casualties, 3 destroyed warehouses and a thick cloud of toxic looking smoke. Luckily none of the galleries were close enough to the site of the fire to be seriously affected and since then it seems that fire safety precautions have been dramatically improved ...... or there's been a blanket ban on reporting fires in Al Quoz :).

This tragedy is the background and inspiration for the current exhibition at Total Arts gallery that has to rate among the most memorable I have seen in my two years here. Total Arts was founded by architect Darius Zandi and artist Shaqayeq Arabi and was the first gallery to set up in Al Quoz way back in 1996. After the fire Zandi and Arabi visited the burnt out warehouse and were so affected by what they saw they began a long process of transporting things from the site back to the gallery.

The result is Scraps, an installation composed entirely of materials, artefacts and incidental objects found at the site with site photos projected against two of the gallery walls. The scale of the installed pieces varies from huge warped sheets of corrugated metal suspended from ceilings and used to create artificial walls, to small and fragile fragments of paper or cloth.

Some pieces stand on plinths like highly original sculptures, most amazingly a collection of hundreds of pairs of metal scissors all melded together by the heat of the fire. A partially collapsed bicycle stands precariously upright surrounded by different piles of objects fused in plastic, metal and wood. There are melted tins, jars, knives, safety pins, toothbrushes, bicycle pumps, a cash register, a sewing machine and many other everyday objects rendered almost unrecognisable by the furnace they emerged from.

Many of the smaller finds have been transformed into installations in their own right. One wall is covered with blackened food trays set with piles of melted forks and spoons and a metal sheet is covered with knife blades. A series of boxes contain a curious mix of objects, scraps of documents, textiles and electrical wires.

The whole thing is a sensory experience crystallised by a soundtrack of muffled explosions and the all pervading odour of burnt metal, wood and plastic. It manages to address several different levels and aspects of its own particular local context as well as referencing wider points of aesthetics and art history - a dual achievement still very rare in exhibitions here.

It is also a unique and moving memorial to those who died.

Scraps runs until end August at Total Arts Gallery, Al Quoz

Ajman-ski and fish

Last week I ticked the Ajman box .... this means that I have managed to visit all 7 Emirates during my stay here.... OK ... so Umm Al Qawain may only have been a trip to Dreamland but it counts!

Ajman was only a fleeting visit for one evening but we packed a lot in. First there was dinner at the Casa Samak almost on the sand at the Coral Beach resort. Unfortunately it was buffet night so the food was rather grim but apparently the normal menu is excellent and as the name suggests fish is a speciality. However I don't really see how it can beat the Al Sheraa fish restaurant in Sharjah which is an absolute treat. I went there with a group of friends after an afternoon at the biennial. There is a menu mostly of fish nobody had ever heard so we ordered a few different kinds which were served whole for everyone to share. They were gorgeous and the shrimp was sublime. If you know what you're doing you can even go and select your own fish. Highly recommended although Coral Beach obviously trumps it on location!

But back to Ajman. After dinner we went for stroll down the corniche which is very lively, full of people (and cruising cars) and real buzz. Then to the huge Ajman Kempinski which is completely over the top and has bizarre rules like not being allowed to go in the sea after sunset even just to paddle! I took off my shoes and made determined moves toward the shore but was stopped by security before the water hit my toes. I loved the geometric parquet in the lobby. This was the first thing I noticed but the next obvious thing was the couple who didn't look like they were married casually waiting for the elevator enroute to a very temporary room rental.

It was another of those great UAE contrasts. From the corniche packed with movement, barbecues and great weekend atmosphere - South Asian bachelors, assorted families and a lot of local families - to the opulence and decadence of the adjacent 5 star. Another lovely anomaly is that the wholesale Al Kahool outlet is right opposite the palace which made me grin. But what was most striking were the Russians. The hotels were full of them and there was even a fur coat shop in the lobby of the Coral Beach resort. Down the main drag there were shop signs in Russian too. There were the usual quota of inebriated Brits who are found anywhere there is an Al Kahool outlet but in Ajmanski they shall be mercilessly crushed by the competition from their Eastern European neighbours....

My taxi driver is also my gynaecologist..

I have got very used to the deliberations of taxi drivers on the childless state of spouse and myself. There seems to be no concept of privacy about family matters which means that I have had the same conversation in about 70% of taxis I took in Dubai and possibly 80% in Sharjah! The drivers are usually, though not always, Pakistani and the conversation is conducted at varying levels of English with bits of Arabic thrown in. After "madam where come from ?" the next question is always:

"you husban’??"

followed by:

"you baby? 1? 2? 3?"

Answering 'no' to the baby question inevitably opens up an insistent line of reproductive enquiry. On establishing the existence of a 'problem' the next question from the driver is invariably:

"you problem? husban' problem?"

.. and so a most sensitive and intimate subject becomes a perfectly normal and acceptable conversation with a total stranger!

Over the past two years I have been told more than once that under Islamic law I can divorce and get a new husband who will “give me baby”. I have also received the phone numbers of “very good doctor” in Pakistan. The funniest one was a driver who asked if my husband worked very hard and then came home and went to sleep. When I said yes, I was earnestly informed that this was “big problem” because "for make baby husban' must wake up".

The most harrowing was a driver who had 7 children in a village near Peshawar. He was so upset by how he perceived the situation that he actually started to cry and said that if his children were here he would give one of them to me.

I only ever got one offer of a more physically direct contribution to my motherhood but I pretended not to understand and didn't give the driver a tip .....

In most cases, especially when language options are limited, the journeys end with an acknowledgement of the powerlessness of humanity and the absolute necessity for trust in the will of god. Allah karim can only ever be the safe conclusion!

These and other experiences and conversations with taxi drivers will be among my strongest memories of the UAE. I have heard stories about the lives and the politics of every part of Pakistan and know which buildings in Dubai are owned by which members of Pakistan's ruling families. I have heard tales of arduous road trips between Abu Dhabi and Sudan or Yemen via Saudi Arabia and across the Red Sea. Drivers like that who have been here many years have taught me a lot about the UAE and how it has changed. Over 18 years one driver had descended from being in the Abu Dhabi Air Force to driving a cab in Sharjah. I heard similar stories from Yemenis and Bahrainis who were in the police force but gradually squeezed out as policy shifted to employing more UAE nationals. Some of these stories are bitter, some reveal fascinating facts about crime and corruption while others leave you suspicious that the driver is omitting a key transgression of his own which resulted in the forced career change!

Living here may have made me redefine my working definition of freedom (i.e. an integrated public transport system!) but its absence gave me access to a whole fleet of social, cultural and political commentators, storytellers and UAE historians. It also provided a lot of surprisingly personal human contact that I would not otherwise have had.

Of course there were the absolute nightmare taxi drivers as well. However, they were a minority and generally consisted of those poor b******s seemingly fresh from the village, who hadn’t been in the taxi for more than a few days and appeared to have had no training, no orientation and certainly no suggestion that listening to a woman with a map might be a good idea……. it's those ones that make freedom seem like an integrated public transport system. By integrated I mean inter-emirate too. I miss being able to lose several hours staring out of train windows at passing landscape while listening to the infinite possibilities of 10,000 MP3 tracks on random .....

Bellissimo..

In relation to a post on April 9th about not being paid I am delighted to say that I checked my bank account today and one of the Italians has coughed up! It was not immediately apparent which one but a little research revealed it was Il Giornale Dell'Architettura. So thank you very much! Better late than never and I am sure it had nothing to do with the earlier blog post and associated comments ....

My four days of the Dubai dream...

This week I am house and cat sitting for a friend who lives in a Dubai dream villa! Each day starts with a majestic descent of the wide marble staircase then padding gently across the huge antique Persian rug in the hall I sweep into the light and spacious kitchen. While the coffee is brewing. I fix breakfast, collect the newspapers by the door and then head through the patio doors for the poolside. After a leisurely breakfast I take a light morning swim, a long and luxurious shower in my own bathroom and only then do I think about turning on the laptop.

The laptop even has its own room overlooking the front garden and in between emails, articles and updating proposals, I watch the birds delicately flitting from tree to tree. I then head out to all the meetings I've arranged over these four days to discuss my new project. The project gets an amazing response from everybody I pitch it to and I get lots of good advice and contacts as well as unconditional offers of support. I also get to see a lot of new exhibitions, every taxi I take has a lovely driver and I don't get stuck in any traffic!

I return to my fabulous villa, write up my notes and then spend an hour or so swimming in the cool, freshwater pool while the overhanging bougainvillea branches drop flowers gently into the water......

In the evenings I catch up with friends I've hardly seen since moving to Sharjah and go to a book launch where I see lots of other people I haven't seen since leaving Dubai. The four days really remind me of what is good about Dubai and what I miss about it but mostly they reveal just how much easier life is when lived from a spacious villa with a pool set in a beautiful secluded garden!

It really got me thinking that its time for a career change. Hmmm..... will start investigating how I can become a professional international house and cat sitter.....

Fujairah Rocks... real rocks....

Went on mega hike in Fujairah mountains at the weekend. We had been talking about doing this for ages but the friend with the car had been too busy. He finally had a free weekend so we all got up ridiculously early for a Friday and headed out from Sharjah on an almost empty road. Somewhere between Masafi and Fujairah we pulled off the road, parked up, stuffed 4 litres of water in each of our backpacks and got walking.

We started on a dry river bed and then went up and up and up. All the potential paths up are essentially water runs and as you get higher you can see exactly where all the different streams come down. Easy to see how sudden heavy rainfall could cause flash floods and make it a very dangerous place to be. We were really lucky with the weather. It was perfect for hiking. Overcast enough to block out the worst of the sun but not dense enough to pose any serious risk of rain.

There was really nothing much up there except goats, a few birds, trees and cane reeds, a light scattering of wild lavender and some other mountains shrubs and flowers. We did also see a couple of tiny lizards, some cool psychedelic orange wasps and a lot more flies than expected when we got out the food! However, what was most amazing was all the water. We came across a lot of tiny springs that just appear out of nowhere and then disappear back into the ground after just a few metres. The biggest one had actually eroded three downward tiered pools and it was weird to see a toad living in the biggest one along with some toad spawn, other pond like creatures and a dead beetle. It is so barren up there otherwise this was really unexpected. I guess the springs all go down into an underground aquifer somewhere nearby. Maybe they end up in Masafi bottles. So next time you buy a bottle of Masafi just remember the toad got to it first!

There were a lot of holes in the sides of mountains, some were tiny but others looked like quite large caves. We couldn't work out if these were naturally occurring or had actually been gouged out at some point. When we got up to the highest point there were a lot of large rocks that were so deeply red they looked as if they had been painted but the rock types were pretty varied so there was a range of colours in general. I am not great at identifying rock but I found a small piece of something full of shiny gold bits which could have been Dubai bling rock. Otherwise it was granite and many softer shale-type rocks which created a lot of loose scree and gravel. This made coming down quite hard especially because we took a different route down which ended up being steeper than the one we took up. This got quite challenging at times and I have an impressively large bruise on my ass to prove it but I am really glad I got to do it especially knowing that I will outta here in a couple of months. So thank you to friends with cars! Getting a taxi driver to wait at the side of a road in the middle of nowhere for 6 hours just wouldn't have been the same!

This ain't no way to make a living..

Since the coolest job in the universe could only ever be temporary it came to its sad but allotted end. Since then I have been scrabbling around for work again which is as much of a pain in the proverbial as ever. Life for a freelancer is not easy here. Especially in the arts field despite all the hype.... and as for just turning up and being an artist forget it! Without considerable independent means you are constantly looking for the next project that is going to provide an income and they are so few and far between you never actually get to that position where you have enough behind you to buy materials and rent a cheap studio space ... err... not that they exist ... yet!

It's harder when you know it's temporary as well. This means you don't actually have a long term vested interest in the location itself so motivation is difficult to sustain. This is compounded by the absence of the kind of wider (and personal) support system that takes time to build up.

I have also discovered that the life of a freelance writer completely sucks. I now understand friends in this field who said they spend most of the time chasing up invoices. I have actually given up on two lots of money I am owed for articles ... both organisations based in Italy as it happens. It may seem churlish to have a go at Italy given the earthquake and all ... but Flash Art International suck and don't ever mention Il Giornale dell’Architettura in my presence unless you want a black eye.

What makes me most angry is how they just go silent. No answers to emails, no apologies, no nuffin'! If they at least emailed to say a) your article was so crap we can't use it or b) they decided not to publish the 'special feature on the UAE' so we can't extract payment or just c) sorry we're charlatans and we're not going to pay you... I would feel soooo much better!

But never mind... the departure date is drawing ever nearer and so I guess it's quite appropriate that my next project is not based in the UAE at all. However, if this potential project is going to work I will definitely need some help from people I've met here ... and the usual inshallah's all round of course!!

The Fantabulous Sharjah Biennale

 

The advantage of the Sharjah Biennale is that it’s there for long enough to take a leisurely look at although I’m not sure how much human traffic it gets once the frenzy of the opening week is done. That said I was loitering suspiciously in Sharjah last Saturday and there were quite a lot of visitors going in and out of the Sharjah Art Museum.

This is just one of the Biennale venues but contains the most work in one place. It is also an amazing building. It has sloping floors which make walking around a slightly disconcerting experience a bit like being in one of those optical illusion prints by Escher of never-ending staircases. This architectural feature is actually used by two of the artists. Ayse Erkmen created a false room with the lights hanging at an angle. However, because you are viewing it from an angle it seems as if the false room is the one with the correct proportions. Karin Sander created a track around two corridors along which a chrome ball can run simply because of the downward slope of the floor. The only problem with this is that someone needs to switch the ball onto the other side of the circuit when it reaches the bottom so that it is in constant motion. I have been there several times now and not once have I seen this happen. I guess not all the security guys were told that this was part of the job!

There is a lot of stuff to see and you really do need time especially to check out all the video work. Liu Wei’s Hopeless Lands is a short and disturbing video about Chinese farmers who now eke out a living from urban trash. Seeing hundreds of people swarming around the back of a lorry as it spills its contents onto a massive dump site is an image that will stay with me for some time. By contrast Liliana Porter’s Fox in the Mirror, in which music is played by an orchestra of ceramic, plastic and wax figures, was a lot of fun. Definitely a dark edge to it but overall highly entertaining. Not sure what Zebra by Haris Epaminonda was about other than spectrum but enjoyed the constant drifting refrain of Bach’s Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 in G Minor. Actually the only thing the visual aspect of this work brought to my mind was an ink jet printer commercial but I guess I missed something.

Fernando Jose Pereira’s, Remote Control-Remove Control in its own reconstructed Icelandic hut ended up being less interesting than it sounded. That was actually the case with several other works. The concepts and ideas underpinning them ended up seeming more impressive than the work itself. That said it was nice to briefly feel the icy chill of an Icelandic day in the middle of Sharjah!

Basma Al Sharif’s video We began by measuring distance received one of the Biennale artist prizes. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually seen it all the way through yet so can’t comment but it’s reserved for a complete and slow viewing next time I’m down there along with Primoz and Novak’s fictional documentary Going South and Ghani and Kelly’s, Smile you’re in Sharjah.
Over the road in the Serkal House are videos by Sharif Waked and Nikolaj Larsen. Waked uses the now familiar media image of a suicide bomber’s last broadcast but his protagonist reads excerpts from One Thousand and One Nights thus avoiding the usual horrific denouement. This mirrors the origin of the tales themselves in which Scheherazade narrates one tale after another to King Shahrayar in order to save herself and her tribe from execution. It is quite mesmerizing listening to the tales and very frustrating when suddenly the tale switches and you don’t get to hear the end.

Nikolaj Larsen’s work consists of two videos projected onto facing screens. On one screen Indian migrant workers based in Sharjah stand staring into the camera. On the opposite screen their families back in India do the same. Watching these simultaneous screenings in the space between, where the viewer can see both but they can’t see each other, was a very intimate and actually very moving experience. I cannot recall having been moved to tears by a video installation before! Maybe it was just one of those days.

I reviewed the biennial for a US arts website (here: Absolute Arts) but other things that stood out that I haven’t mentioned elsewhere were a room full of Robert Macpherson’s assorted work, Yonamine's sandbag installation and Hiroyuki Masuyama’s light boxes. Nadia Kaabi Linke’s hanging paint fragments making a map of the UAE cast beautiful shadows on the surrounding walls and Hayv Kahraman’s meticulously composed Domesticated Marionettes were also perfectly placed for maximum impact in their big space in the Serkal House.

The overall mix of mediums, styles, concepts, materials and spaces means that there is probably something for everyone here, even if you don't have much time, and the kids will love The Box!

One other observation though is maintenance. Admittedly keeping all this going for two months is difficult. It’s not just hanging pictures on a wall and leaving them there! So expect a few un-replaced light bulbs on certain installations, the odd lack of transmission on headphones and no doubt a few other mechanical and technical hitches to come before May 16th!

Whatever…. Just GO! You’ve got over a month ….

Review - Art Dubai and Al Bastakiya Art Fair

I spent most of the current UAE art and culture frenzy in Sharjah at the Biennial (about which I’ll write later) but spent a couple of days at Art Dubai and the Al Bastakiya Art Fair (formerly Creek Art Fair – there’s a lot of re-branding about at the moment!).

The first thing I saw in Art Dubai was an old friend, visually speaking, which was Nelson Leirner. His wacky assortment of Mona Lisa memorabilia mounted in small separate frames covering a whole wall was immediately recognisable as his. Last year he covered a whole wall with manipulated Sotheby's catalogues and on talking to the Bolsa de Arte people I discovered that this work had actually been bought by Christies which is pretty funny in itself. However, the idea to feature him alone this year didn't really work. It needed some variety to balance his singularity and without that the work seemed to become like caricature.

Wandering around this year I didn't see much that truly grabbed me but I really liked the Trojan horse style building by Gigi Scaria at Sun and Sun Contemporary Gallery and the big painting at Michael Schultz by Huang Min which placed modern tourists in front of a traditional painted Chinese scene. The Mario Mauroner Gallery had some interesting works on paper by Barthelemy Togno and an epic installation by Fabrizio Plesso called Armada Rosso. This was a big bank of thick coppery metal shelves containing skeins of red wool. The base shelf was composed of a line of TV screens showing a looped video of waste water from the dyeing process running like a river of blood.

I saw a few things from Dubai galleries this year that I hadn't seen before and which were great. From the Third Line, Ala Ebteker's Ahmadinejad jacket made me laugh out loud and if it were mine I would definitely wear it although I may have to insert a caption that reads ‘I now kill bloggers too’. Ahmedinejad (a.k.a Imadinnerjacket) really should have been a comedian rather than the ruler of a country that truly deserves much better leaders. We would all have been so much better off but it’s never too late for a career change. Farhad Moshiri's latest work was there too but that is probably covered by some of the comments below.

Art Space’s installation by Ahmed Matar of a magnet and iron filings representing Mecca was brilliant in its simplicity and consequently made an impact on a number of different levels. It was also a very fresh image relating to the region as the key marketing trends are starting to wear very thin. Zena Al Khalil's furry and confettied kitsch Kalashnikovs at Tanit are a shining example of how rapidly an easily overplayed idea can become novelty art. In fact a lot of what I saw this year from all over seemed to fit into that category.

There seems to be a general disinclination to think too much and then claim subversion or irony while hoping the global attention span of a goldfish means you get away with it. This is starting to result in some pretty trashy product. It really does seem to have become more product than art and in relation to regional product if I see one more woman in an abaya/scarf variation image I'll scream. Particularly if it's juxtaposed with something western and especially if that happens to be Coca Cola as in the work of one artist in Al Bastakiya. Get over it... as a friend of mine remarked.

The honourable exception to this was Waheeda Malullah's short video piece Colours which was showing in the Bidoun Art Park and as usual there was a lot of good video work down there which I didn’t have time to see. Why oh why can’t you buy DVDs of work showing in the Art Park? It’s a captive market so you can inflate the price and proceeds can then be distributed accordingly! I thought this at the Dubai Film Festival as well. There were several films I would have bought including some that I actually saw and really wanted to show other people.

Talking of video it was the video installation pieces at Art Dubai that I found most memorable this year. Having had a lot of experience in the field, I loved the idea of Kutlug Ataman's multi-video English as a Foreign Language at Francesco Minini, but completley failed to understand why the Abraaj Prize piece was rated so highly.

Ferideh Lashai's three-part video at Al Bareh Gallery was a development and extension of her piece last year in the Art Fair formerly known as Creek. The work has been extended in terms of both medium and scope now re-telling a whole story rather than being a straightforward but innovative projection piece. In the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery 'Oil Paintings' were apocalyptic projections of burning oil fires onto painted canvas. They were fascinating to watch and provoked a lot of questions and interest. I actually quite liked them but did wonder about their gimmicky nature. Fantastic for atmospheric exhibitions in darkened rooms and likely to attract the curious hordes but would I buy one? Probably not.

Arguably a work in the Agial Gallery (I didn't get the artist's name unfortunately) encapsulates everything I’ve moaned about above - stereotypes, gimmicks, kitsch, novelty etc. but I loved it. Several heads with faces obscured to various degrees in a now definitive militant visual were painted on an up-ended mobile vegetable stand of the type you see all over the Middle East. The stand was painted with gold and flowers and even had small light bulbs across the top depicting the constellation of the plough. Maybe it was this material authenticity that made it so different and the fact that it was also reminiscent of European iconography. It seemed to have a bit of everything - politics, religion, several kinds of history, low-end economics and astronomy used in a way that even managed to reference celebrity.

Others that stick in my head are Haunch of Venison, the Kalfayan Galleries, the October Gallery and Kashya Hildebrand for Anja Jensen and particularly Gohar Dashti. I also liked the minimalist plasticity of Lee Bae's reworking of old themes at Hakgojae. Maitha Huraiz’s work Behind Closed Doors at Elementa stood out and this was confirmed on seeing that the same piece had sold several copies down at the Bastakiya. There was actually a lot of photographic work relating to the region especially Iraq and Palestine including some great Gazan interiors by Taysir Bataniji at LA Bank and Rula Halawani's oddly angled images of checkpoints and the wall at Selma Feriani. This all tied in nicely with the Mapping Palestine exhibition curated by Art School Palestine which included a series of seminal Palestinian video shorts in the Bidoun Art Park.

A lot of work this year seemed to touch on environments in the widest sense– interiors and exteriors, urban and organic. In many cases these elements were mixed up particularly in Bastakiya where one of the highlights was the Guy Flichy Gallery exhibiting Monica Zeitline and Bryan Nash Gill. Juxtaposing Gill’s nature based, muted print and sculpture works with Zeitlines busy urban collages worked really well.

Another highlight of Bastakiya was Bo Tasle d’Heliand whose images of the Turkana people in Kenya had a Google earth perspective and used earth and other materials from the locations depicted. Unfortunately, it was hard to appreciate their scale and detail in the small and rather dark room they were crowded into.

I didn’t go to many of the talks in Dubai this year. In fact the only one was about Online Art Journals in which I obviously have a vested interest. Sadly the chance of being paid to write about these events this year fell through after a dispute about money with ..… an online art journal! It was widely agreed that Flash Art International really should consider being more generous with its contributors.....