HONOURABLE MENTIONS
The National tried its darnedest to get the best of the art scene in 2018 to you, but a few things slipped through its fingers. Here are the honourable mentions: the stories that should have been.
Hashel Lamki and Mohamed Al Mazrouei’s Alibaba at the NYUAD Project Space
This was a beautiful show of two artists’ work: one younger (Lamki, who graduated in 2017 from the SEAF programme) and one older (Al Mazrouei, a veteran Abu Dhabi artist who used to work in the library of the Culture Foundation). The connections between them are material: Lamki works in Al Mazrouei’s old studio (and Al Mazrouei’s entire house, which has become the artists’ space Bait 15 while he is in Cairo).
Many of Lamki’s works were patient re-explorations of the detritus that Al Mazrouei left behind, such as paintbrushes, a fan and soap, while a largescale painting, made together, depicts a nightmarish scenario of hanging meat and deserted corridors. What can partnership ward against?
Between the Visible and the Invisible at Maraya Art Centre, curated by Azadeh Fatehrad This show was organised around the idea of vision, with works that leaked out into lyrical examinations of ghostliness: the town in Northeye in Sussex, abandoned in the Middle Ages, in a video by Leah Fusco, or Pia Sandstrom’s He happened not to be there, made after the loss of her father, which shows her sister wearing their father’s clothes, reenacting scenes Hiroshima mon amour in their family home.