A visit to Alserkal Avenue over Design Week highlights the growing variety on offer. As well as celebrated art galleries, there is furniture, lighting, ceramics, jewellery, clothing and even chocolate to be found behind these warehouse’s doors.
The Odd Piece design store is showing a selection of surreal furniture from Spanish icons Salvador Dalí and Antoni Gaudí, courtesy of Barcelona Design. The languid Dalí chair has legs that end in dainty heeled shoes, and Gaudi’s solid oak Calvet chair stands close by. More legends of modernism can be found a few streets over in La Galerie Nationale. Chrystyna Salam has co-curated The Apartment with owner Guillaume Cuiry. It is a divine show home full of vintage pieces dating from the 1950s to the 1970s. With quirky ceramics from Pol Chambost and Roger Capron, paintings from Jacques Nestlé and elegant minimal furniture, this is idyllic 20th Century living. At M.A.D. Gallery, you can jump forward in time to view the futuristic Böhm Stirling Assembly Workshop. The first to assemble all the nuts and bolts of a working miniature windmill got to take the intricate engine home.
Nearby, Zayed University’s College of Arts and Creative Enterprises is hosting a pop-up exhibition of their finest recent graduates. Laser cutting and 3D techniques are evidently popular with these designers. Mariam Al Binali is a rising star. She has a simple wooden box on show, beautifully etched using laser. Inside are different storybooks, one a pop-up, another a scroll, all celebrating human flaws. Al Binali is as much a poet as she is a painter. Sara Al Ali’s design for a reading room is incredibly detailed, a bookshelf as a cocoon to read in. Ayesha Hadhir’s outsized chair sculpture dominates the room with bright pink threads trailing below. Her limited edition 3D-printed handbags are fanciful and fun. These makers were fresh from the panel discussion on emerging female designers in the UAE. They spoke about the mentor-student relationship, and the growing confidence in local creative industries.
Mirzam Chocolate’s lively new factory is a sensory experience from the moment you enter, with the aroma of cocoa beans roasting. Pieces from design house Envoy are here too, some resembling edible chocolate chairs. For design week, Mirzam is focusing on Monsters and Maps, the fantastical histories behind the routes Oriental traders took with cocoa and spices. Each bar is an artwork in itself, printed locally of course. I recommend sipping on some cocoa tea in their Tasting Gallery while digesting all you’ve experienced in this fantastic district of Dubai.
* Dubai Design Week continues until Saturday in venues across the city: www.dubaidesignweek.ae
Anya Stafford is a guest writer for The Art Blog. She has been writing on arts and culture in the Middle East for three years. She's also worked and lectured on communications, arts and technology with the likes of Google and Goldsmiths University London. She is studying for an MFA in Media through the National College of Art and Design, she also holds an MSc in Interactive Digital Media from Trinity College, both from Dublin, Ireland. Find out more about her and read her work at www.anyastafford.com
