A NEW HOME FOR FRESH ART ON DUBAI’S OLD CREEK
▶ With a library of 3,000 books, galleries, a lush public garden and an amphitheatre, Jameel Arts Centre is totally different for Dubai – a city of superlatives – and it opens today, writes Melissa Gronlund
The Jameel Arts Centre, a significant addition to the contemporary cultural landscape of Dubai, opens today. Its director, Antonia Carver, describes it as the first “non-commercial, nongovernment institution, and one with civic mandate”. A development of the Saudi organisation Art Jameel, the centre offers three floors of exhibition space, plus a library, restaurant, design shop, outdoor amphitheatre and members’ room.
The custom-made building, designed by Serie Architects, is on the Jaddaf Waterfront and positioned right on Dubai Creek. Light, water and access are vital – every door seems to open on to a public thoroughfare and wallsize windows face on to water to show the creek flowing by.
Little light wells dotted throughout have perfectly assembled miniature gardens. The trees in these nooks are refugees, all rehomed by a man who rescues them when they are uprooted from sites in southern Africa – they are poignant little fighters. “There’s a Namibian tree,” Carver notes, pointing to one of them. “That’s 300 years old.”
One room is painted black, another turquoise. Let’s just say Jameel Arts Centre isn’t cookie-cutter. It’s like it said yes to every idea its staff members proposed.
The free-to-visit centre wants to ‘build a new audience for contemporary art’
The idea behind the centre, says Carver, is “to produce exhibitions and works that challenge audiences to think about their world”. She says “nurturing a community and building a new audience for contemporary art” is something that the Jameel family and Art Jameel are passionate about.
Jameel Arts Centre is the first major project in Dubai by Art Jameel and was founded in 2004 by the Saudi Jameel family who made their fortune in car dealerships. The foundation is a longtime supporter of culture and education. It runs a House of Traditional Arts in Jeddah and Cairo to support artisanal production, and forged partnerships with institutions such as the V&A in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that have helped publicise Middle Eastern artists.
They’re also in the middle of building a major institution in Jeddah – Hayy: Creative Hub – which will function as a focal point for the city’s dispersed art community. Construction for that larger project was delayed, and the new Dubai centre has pipped it to the post.
“Thinking strategically, the reason behind the Dubai centre was – how do you have the maximum impact in a place that really needs art institutions?” Carver asks.
“In places like London or New York, it’s much better for us to work with institutions to make sure they’re representing Middle Eastern artists.
“Then, we thought about cities around the world where Art Jameel has a presence already. Dubai is the most obvious, where you can reach a broad international public, where cultural tourists are looking for an institution to visit – to gain a window into regional art talent – and where there’s a local public hungry for an institution too.”
The institution will draw on Art Jameel’s impressive collection, but mostly operate like a gallery with a focus on temporary exhibitions.
There are three galleries on the main floor that are earmarked for solo presentations. Galleries on the upper two floors will mostly cater to curated group shows.
The opening four solo presentations are of women artists who are important in the region but who have not had the level of attention they deserve. Maha Malluh from Saudi Arabia reflects on women’s labour. Lala Rukh was a Pakistani artist and activist who worked with minimalism and sound.
Rukh’s work here is a monochrome representation of recordings of her mother’s heartbeat in the last year of her life. The room for this installation is painted entirely black. It’s fitting for the subject matter, and signals a broader play with colour in the institution.
A room by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is suffused, ecstatically, maniacally, with red threads that threaten to consume a weathered dhow that sits in the centre.
The museum also has a number of community spaces. A members’ room allows freelancers a place to work and to meet. School visits are a priority: on its opening day, the first visitors to the centre will be children aged 12 to 14.
The library of 3,000 art and art history books and periodicals is open access and a shop stocks local and regional designers and contemporary art books.
Even when the building is not open, you can wander up to the garden where an extraordinarily beautiful installation of fantastical lighted trees is visible along the creek. This is an installation by Kuwait-based artists Alia Farid and Aseel AlYaqoub. From next month there will be a restaurant too, an outpost of Lighthouse, the art-world (and royal) favourite from Dubai Design District.
A huge outdoor amphitheatre will have spaces for concerts and films during the winter months, set among a sculpture park that has been developed with Dubai Holding. It’s an openness that you might expect would sit uneasily with the centre’s programme of ambitious, intellectual shows. But Carver disagrees.
“Quite often there’s an impression that critically minded exhibitions are
somehow alienating to a mass public, but I don’t think that’s true,” she says. “The mass audience for art in Dubai has come of age concurrently with the last 20 years of art practice.”
Dubai’s art audience, in a sense, is ready for the next level of curatorial attention.
For its first show, Jameel Arts Centre called on longtime UAE resident Murtaza Vali, who is also an adviser to the new venture. In Crude, he uses the history of crude oil to frame art production in the region.
“We’re a Middle East organisation, so we’ll do a show about what’s our reality, without having to declare it,” Vali says. “MoMA [in New York] won’t do a show about Western art and have to declare it. This was an attempt to do a show about Arab modernism without saying it’s about Arab modernism.”
Arranged roughly chronologically, the show begins with the discovery of oil in Iraq, as documented by photographer Latif Al Ani, and later examined by Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck in a brilliant installation.
A commissioned work by Montreal-based artist Hajra Waheed explores the history of the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. The installation ends on a contemporary note, linking petroleum by-products such as rubber flip-flops – 500 in Emirati artist Hassan Sharif’s monumental pile – with consumerism and car culture.
The show will run until March, although the four solo exhibitions will end in February. Four new artists will be presented for March art week. “Every time people come back,” says Carver, “there will be something different.”