Uk-middle East collaboration connects artists, reduces distances
SHARJAH: The Arab British Centre, London, in collaboration with the British Council, has launched two new digital artworks created as part of their Connect ME Digital Residency programme. Connect ME pairs creatives aged 18-30 based in the GCC (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates) and the United Kingdom, to create collaborative digital work over a four-week programme of online mentoring. This edition was mentored by multi-disciplinary Saudi artist Manal Aldowayan. Over the past month, multimedia artist Dina Khatib (UAE) and illustrator Ollie Cameron (UK), and artist and designer Carolin Schnurrer (UK) and visual artist Meshal Al-obaidallah (KSA), have been working together on projects that consider how digital tools can encourage connectivity across borders.
Articles of Exceptional Value is a collaborative effort by Khatib and Cameron to document the 5,597 kms distance between them. In a time where physical forms of communication are heavily restricted, the artists explored how visualising the unseen space between them could become a means for connection and exchange. Over the course of a month, they posted a series of packages to each other, between the UK and Dubai, each one containing an unusual drawing device that gathered data of its journey.
Khatib said of her residency experience: “My experience of collaborating across borders was very interesting. “Our goal for the project was to figure out why we had been paired with each other, how our practices were similar and different. We found that we both have a research-intensive process, but with mine focused on a digital media output and Ollie’s on an analogue. Articles of Exceptional Value is a combination of those elements.” Cameron said that “the biggest challenge that Dina and I faced during the residency was setling on one idea! As artists who both love research, we gladly could have been experimenting and playing around with different ideas up to the day before the deadline.” Carolin Schnurrer and Meshal Al-obaidallah have created FAREWELL ARABIA: A Bold New Vision, a digital experience that reinforces today’s repetition of dominant narratives from the distant past — the looping of past and future histories. Together, they seek to recalibrate viewers’ perception of ‘the other’ culture. In their work, they explore the Arabian Peninsula through the lenses of orientalism (externally) and provincialism (internally). How is ‘the other’ perceived from a distance? Their digital artwork is centered round an old postcolonial British documentary, set in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1960s. The narrator tells of the sudden development of Arabia, in the wake of the oil boom and its impact on society.
FAREWELL ARABIA recycles history to tell of the current changing landscape, urban rezoning, and the colossal giga-projects. With a focus on audio and text, the collage is presented as a story on an experimental website, narrated by a non-human voice.
Al-obaidallah said: “Through our exchange, we collected found footage, sound bites, quotes, symbols, and other fragments. These reappropriated fragments were processed, destroyed, accelerated, decelerated, and rearranged. This mishmash of fact and fiction prompts a not-so-new understanding of the region.” Schnurrer said that “one of the main challenges in creating FAREWELL ARABIA was learning how to work together remotely. It’s harder to connect online than when together in a studio, but with digital collaboration on the rise, it’s important that artists define their own ways of working together — we found our flow through quicker and more constant communication via messages and screenshots, shorter meetings, and even working silently together with Zoom running.”
The new artworks are available to view via the Making Marks website. To celebrate the end of this edition of the Connect ME Residency, a talk is being hosted on March 3 via Zoom. The mentor and artists will reflect on their time in the residency, present finished artworks and provide insights into their creative processes.
Khatib is a multimedia designer based in Dubai. She explores various ways through which different forms of media can be integrated, and embraces the constantly shiting nature of her practice. Cameron is an Illustration graduate from London. In his work, he experiments with how illustration can be used to document the world around us.
Schnurrer is a London-based artist and designer whose work explores how human bodies connect on a primal haptic level and how we can use them to establish connections that overcome limits of borders, culture, language, and other such categories of exclusion.
Al-obaidallah began as a visual artist in 2014, as an experimental mode of archiving narratives. Through cultural artifacts, his conceptual works document current issues and affairs of Saudi Arabia. His works cover the geopolitical landscape of the Arab world and the region in general. They have been exhibited across the Gulf region and outside the region, such as in the UK and the US. Making Marks is a strand of programming by Arab British Centre, in partnership with the British Council, which focuses on the development of artists from the UK and the Arab world through international exchange programmes, commissions, and opportunities for artistic collaboration. The programme challenges stereotypes of cultures and highlights the similarities, differences, and universal challenges facing emerging creatives the world over. The Arab British Centre is a cultural organisation which works to further understanding of the Arab world in the United Kingdom. Established in 1934, the British Council is the world’s leading cultural relations organisation, touching the lives of almost 600 million people every year.