For Cristiana de Marchi, the curator of an exhibition celebrating the life and legacy of the late Emirati artist Hassan Sharif, it’s personal.
Italian-Lebanese artist Cristiana de Marchi is the curator of Homage Without An Homage, an exhibition celebrating the life and legacy of the late Emirati artist Hassan Sharif
How would you describe your job? I am an artist, writer and curator. These three areas of my practice are in fact interconnected and can’t be disjointed. I started writing poetry at a very young age and never stopped throughout my life. During childhood I was trained as a ballet dancer, a discipline that has deeply influenced my life. I see a deep relation between the various areas of my interest: there are threads of thoughts and ideas, interests and themes that I explore through my artistic practice, my writing and my curated projects. Among those concepts, identity, belonging, and the processes of memory making, but also issues related to nationality/nationalisms, borders and migratory phenomena are recurrent. I try to explore from a humanistic perspective those ideas, which have significantly impacted millions of people and are of universal relevance. Did you consider any other career? I really wanted to pursue my career in ballet and that was my first approach to an artistic practice, which has then impacted my career as a visual artist and curator through a deep interest in performance and the use and representation of body. Once one [finds] one’s way in the arts I believe it is difficult to ever consider a change in what I see more as a passion or a motivation than a ‘career’. What would we find you doing today? I typically try to schedule my days in a way to devote the earliest part of the day to work 34 on my artistic practice. I mainly work with embroidery and on a monochrome palette, therefore I need the best light possible – natural sunlight. I am currently creating a series of maps that are in fact portraits and visualise the multilayered composition of an increasing number of people around the world, a theme particularly resonating in a country like the UAE. The late afternoon is ideally dedicated to conceptualising ideas, writing, reading and following up on more theoretical projects. What has been your proudest moment? It’s hard to identify one episode that I am especially proud of, and I tend to always push my limits beyond, to critically analyse my previous achievements and to retrospectively contextualise them within my path. I would say that I feel proud of my courage to stand in front of adversities, to stay true to myself and to be supportive to friends and fellow artists against oddities. Are there any benefits – or challenges – to working as an artist in the Middle East? My artistic practice is deeply connected to the circumstance of living in the Middle East for the past 20 years, in Beirut and Dubai respectively. From my perspective, working in and from this part of the world stimulates as well as it requires an exercise of self-awareness, a continuous quest about ways to produce contents and convey messages that would be relevant and could help to further develop the local scene. What would you like to see happen next? I moved to Dubai in 2006 and I have assisted an extraordinary development in the local art scene. What I feel is still needed is to create a supported art community, a context where artists and other cultural actors can meet, freely discuss ideas and connect. I would also like to see the local educational system integrating UAE artists and their history in the curriculum. Tell us about your relationship with Hassan. It is a great honour for me to curate an exhibition, which is in fact the first tribute to the late Hassan Sharif paid by the local community and generously supported by Julius Baer. I [met] Hassan in 2008. I joined The Flying House, a collective of Emirati contemporary and conceptual artists including Mohammad Kazem, Mohammad Ahmad Ebrahim and Hussain Sharif, and have worked closely with them since. The relation with Hassan and this special group has turned into a friendship and I have been soon integrated in their community. How did you approach the exhibition? I opted for a remembrance of Hassan through his legacy: I have therefore selected 12 artists among the different generations of Emirati art practitioners who have been mentored by or who gathered around Hassan and a few foreign artists who have been close to Hassan during different phases of his life and career... testimony to the inclusive nature of the circle and community that developed around Hassan, starting in the mid 1980s. The idea is that Hassan lives through his work and his legacy, and his teachings will be taken forward by his friends and fellow artists. How important is mentorship? It is a fundamental step in an artist’s career and is multidirectional by nature. Sometimes mentoring happens within a structured context – for instance, I have recently co-curated the show Is Old Gold? where 10 young Emirati artists have been commissioned to produce new works and we mentored them over a period of nearly six months. Other times it naturally happens through deep and critical conversations with like-minded intellectuals. The critical component is always essential, and this is regretfully still missing in the UAE, where a social attitude to politeness often dilutes the possibilities of a profound cultural exchange. Homage Without An Homage is part of Art Dubai, March 15-18 at Madinat Jumeirah.