INSIDE THE EXHIBITION
The big news for the UAE art scene at the moment is naturally the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, in less than two months. But as that flagship project has progressed, behind the scenes, various organisations in the UAE have worked to support the visual arts and design, from ADMAF to the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation.
As the focus of the world turns to the universal museum of Louvre Abu Dhabi, Portrait of a Nation looks at what has been happening within.
What themes emerge? Landscape is a major one. Zeinab Al Hashemi showed a digitally altered aerial map of Abu Dhabi, Coast Collision (2016), in which roads and waterways mirror each other to create a brocaded pattern.
Al Agroobi used the seven different colours of the sand in her work The Desert Rose (2016) to represent the differences among the sands, and ways of life, of the seven Emirates.
It’s not hard to understand why Emirati art should be so interested in landscape: the desert stretches out in undulating sameness and the scale of the human ambition to conquer it has been equally vast, with new villas, hotels and offices continually eking further outwards. Many of the earliest works in what is now considered Emirati contemporary art, made in the 1990s and early 2000s, focused on the subject.
One of the artists active in that generation, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, is represented in Portrait of a Nation with a new work, The Qubba Project (2015), in which he created mounds of rocks in his native Khorfakkan; an image of this, with the same title, is on view in the show. It suggests both the forbiddeness of the western Emirates mountains as well as the pathos of man’s attempts to mimic them.
Other artists chose works for the show that had personal references.
Salama Nasib explains that her fabric installation, Her Patterns (2016), “was inspired by my mother’s textiles back in the 1980s and the ’90s. While looking at [my mother’s] photo albums I came to realize how much I used to admire her choices of fabrics,” she says. “I wanted to dedicate this piece to her.”
Nasib’s work consists of a four-metre-high laser-cut fabric whose pattern was taken from old photographs of her mother’s clothes.
Lateefa bint Maktoum contributed the photograph Family (2016), which originally debuted as part of a cycle of visually elaborate self-portraits in which the artist chronicles becoming a wife and mother. Family shows the artist and her husband, both in national dress, as she holds their son and they gaze out onto the landscape of Dubai beyond, with its sand dunes and – of course – numerous cranes.
The photographs depict an important chapter in many women’s lives. At the same time – remembering that, for a previous generation of Emirati women, it was frowned upon to be photographed – it also is a quiet move to shift the norms for the representation of women. Bint Maktoum appears in all her photographs, but notably always with her face turned away.
Emirati home life also appears in the wooden seating area, The Nomad (2015), that recalls the Emirati traditional shelters, or arishes, made of palm trees and fronds. The Nomad was made by the designer Khalid Shafar and was previously exhibited at Dubai Design District.
The work is exemplary of another key facet of art in the Emirates: the overlap between visual art and design. Whereas these disciplines are conventionally considered as separate – design work has applied uses, whereas visual art is broadly made for art’s sake – in an Emirati context they freely mix. Indications such as these might prove the lasting legacy of this travelling show, which reveals how Emirati art is shifting and adapting cross-cultural norms, often in ways that flaunt how art, Khaleeji or otherwise, is understood abroad.