A car's fuel tank breathes within Dubai's arts district Alserkal Avenue. Removed from its original setting and fitted with vacant eyes, the tank is at once familiar and strange: recognisable, yet stripped of its ordinary form and function.
The installation by German artist Michael Sailstorfer is one of two tanks presented at Deja Vu, a multi-gallery exhibition that brings together 20 venues from across the UAE.
Zaina Zaarour, curator and senior manager of programmes at Alserkal Avenue, says Sailstorfer's piece – on display from Dubai gallery Carbon 12 – echoes the mood from which the exhibition emerged.
“Gas was on everyone’s mind at that time,” she tells The National during an exclusive walkthrough of the show. “Everyone was looking at fuel prices and asking: 'Will we have some? Will we not have some?'”
That flash of uncertainty runs through Deja Vu. But the show is also carried by a sense of renewal, not only for Alserkal Avenue, where the exhibition runs until May 8 at the multidisciplinary venue Concrete, but also for the wider UAE art scene, which is regaining its footing after a disrupted season.
The rhythm is also returning by way of Art Dubai, which moved its original April fair to stage an adapted event in May, as well as Bam Auctions, which makes its debut in Dubai with a contemporary art sale aimed at the region’s secondary market
With the Iran war curtailing much of the spring season, normally one of the busiest periods for galleries owing to exhibitions, collector visits and the momentum surrounding Art Dubai, Alserkal Avenue consulted its gallery community on engaging audiences and collectors.
“It came out of one of our regular meetings with our community members,” Zaarour says. “It was between February and March, so it was a very short timeline to put an exhibition together. But everyone had the initiative, everyone had the will, and everyone understood the necessity of doing something at this time.”
The urgency was commercial and communal. While Deja Vu is curated, it is also an opportunity to buy and sell, with many works priced below $10,000. The full price list is available to visitors, and offers galleries a commercial lifeline during a period when sales conversations, footfall and collector engagement are affected.
“The first thing for us at Alserkal was: what can we do to support our ecosystem, and to support the creative community, some of whom have been in the UAE for more than 20 or 30 years,” Zaarour says.
Sixteen participating galleries are based in Alserkal Avenue, with neighbouring Nika Project Space and Total Arts at The Courtyard, plus Tabari Artspace from the Dubai International Financial Centre and Iris Projects from Abu Dhabi also included.
Yet, Deja Vu is not conceived as a greatest-hits selection. It is an attempt to place artists, histories and commercial realities within a single curatorial frame.
The exhibition takes its title from Raed Yassin’s 2016 neon signage Deja Vu, installed in a corner of the space with the words glowing somewhat ominously. The phrase, Zaarour says, felt apt as people were speaking about the unsettling sensation of living through something they felt they had encountered before.
“At that time, everyone was saying: ‘I feel I’ve lived this before somewhere else. But it seems different. Am I imagining something?’” she says. “We thought of the concept of Deja Vu, a French word that literally means ‘seen before’. But it can also be a memory glitch.”
Zaarour recalls working with co-curators Kevin Jones and Alserkal Arts Foundation director Nada Raza to build the exhibition around three strands.
“We discussed its historical absurdity, meaning history repeating itself, or the absurdity of repeated loops of history,” Zaarour says. “The second is the uncanny. It looks like something you know, but if you look closer, it really is not. The third is language. Especially with the flood of information that comes at us from everywhere, fake news and scrolling on social media, language stops carrying meaning.”
That idea scrolls across Vikram Divecha’s Google Images search works, presented by Gallery Isabelle. The small oil paintings are based on image searches that failed to load due to a weak internet connection. Instead of recording the missing results, Divecha paints the greyed-out shadows of images waiting to appear. The search terms include “production”, “childhood” and “displaces”.
“How is that for a state of tension?” Zaarour says. “You are waiting for something to load, but it is really not loading and you wait for results that will not come.”
Nearby, Emirati artist Juma Al Haj’s Silence in Repetition turns Arabic script into something visually familiar but unreadable. The works, presented by Iris Projects, draw on the appearance of formal calligraphy while withholding legibility.
“This is a very familiar thing to see: formal Arabic calligraphy,” Zaarour says. “But if you look closely, you cannot read it, because language has stopped carrying meaning.”
The exhibition repeatedly returns to that failure of representation. Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s Waiting for Godot series, from Ayyam Gallery, suspends silhouetted figures in expectation. While Shahpour Pouyan’s Monday Recollections of Muqarnas Dome series, from the Lawrie Shabibi gallery, recalls destroyed Iraqi domes in ceramic forms that resemble missiles.
Nearby, Lebanese artist Katya Traboulsi also makes use of this silhouette. In the shape of missiles, works that present countries such as Yemen, Afghanistan, Armenia, Morocco and the Philippines draw on craft traditions from each of those locations. On display from the Leila Heller Gallery, each piece is named after the country represented.
In placing existing works in new proximity, Jones and fellow curators discovered new connections.
“You do find certain through lines. A huge one for me is representation and how representation actually fails us. How does representation break down? When is language no longer trustworthy? When is imagery too slippery to be an index of the real?” he says.
Jones adds that the exhibition came together in a fortnight, a highly unusual timeline. “It is a matter of trust,” he says. “The artists and galleries did not see the hang [of items] until the opening date.
“It is not that we kept it from them, but we put forward this idea that they needed to trust us.”
The response suggests that trust has also shaped how the exhibition is being received. Jones says Deja Vu drew more than 700 visitors a day during its opening weekend, while Zaarour notes that the project has become more than an Alserkal presentation, with each gallery able to recognise its own role in making it happen.
“All the galleries came and felt this was their space,” she says. “And even more satisfying is that people really felt that this was their exhibition as well.”
Deja Vu runs at Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai until May 8
