‘Exchanging love’ vital as Art Dubai takes show online
Art Dubai’s performance program, reconfigured as an online experience this year, addresses the topic of healing as an art form. Participating artists in “On(line) Healing” include Angelo Plessas from Greece, Tabita Rezaire from French Guiana, Brazilian Tiago Sant’Ana, Bahar Noorizadeh from Iran, and Imaad Majeed from Sri Lanka.
“What makes us happy during this period of self-isolation and social distancing is exchanging love and togetherness,” curator Marina Fokidis told Arab News. Long before coronavirus disease (COVID-19) shook the world, Fokidis planned to offer an online component to the performance program. “I wanted to enlarge the idea of the performance to show that the performance can happen without the body actually being there,” she said. “Suddenly, this idea is more important than ever.”
All the performances staged respond to ideas of healing the earth and our bodies. They were enacted all over the world in a variety of settings. Sant’Ana’s performance, “Passar em Branco,” explores the continuity of colonial systems within today’s society in relation to race and work in Brazil. Plessas’ work, “Mission To The Noosphere.com,” consists of objects marked with symbols including the evil eye and various talismans that viewers can move by using their own keyboard — like a video game, except there are no winners or losers. “It’s like a painting that is moving; the user then becomes the painter,” Fokidis said. “It highlights the ambiguous approach of spirituality when coupled with technology.” In “Deep Down Tidal” (2017), Rezaire uses healing to explore ideas of colonialism. The work is a video essay that incorporates spiritual, political, cosmological and technological narratives about “water and its role in communication.”
Majeed actually began his work
— “Please share my self-care” — a few months ago when COVID-19 was first appearing in the news. “He created a tea ceremony that questions if distancing actually helps us talk more openly about what is difficult,” explained Fokidis. In “Please share my selfcare,” Majeed immersed himself in the world of TikTok to explore how rituals and memes respond to the increasing threat of COVID-19. “We will be in the situation we are in for a while and I hope that this channel and others around the world will commission and show works that distract and heal us from the situation that we are in,” Fokidis concluded.