<p>Noura Al Kaabi at the opening of the exhibition</p>
<p>Noura Al Kaabi at the opening of the exhibition</p>

Art

The next generation: Milan Design Week is given a taste of Emirati creativity

Eleven designers from the UAE are feted at Milan Design Week

Melissa Gronlund
Melissa Gronlund

April 25, 2018

Milan Design Week, which took place last week, is the largest event in the industry's calendar, drawing designers, buyers, critics and curators to the northern Italian city. This year, the Emirates was represented with a show for the first time.

The UAE designer Khalid Shafar, who creates furniture and textile pieces, selected 10 Emirati designers to show their work at the Salone del Mobile in UAE Design Stories: The Next Generation from The Emirates. The exhibition which ran for five days from April 17, was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development, and minister Noura Al Kaabi was in Milan.

"The ministry is delighted to support an event of this magnitude. Milan Design Week is more than just a design exhibition – it provides a platform that has a profound and lasting impact," Ms Al Kaabi said. "Design is a disruptive and powerful creative force in shaping narratives, understanding, and conversations. Sharing stories, timeless through the ages, by using design continues to move societies forward."

Many of the designs reflected traditional Bedouin or Emirati techniques, a fruitful area of investigation recently among young designers.

Ahmad Al Areef, an Emirati artist, displayed a work based on the formation of sand dunes. Latifa Saeed showed Kinestic Khoos, in which she created sculptures of children's toys from interlocking palm sheets, updating a traditional Emirati form of object-making.

A number of the works on display in Milan were produced for events within the UAE, showing how Dubai's varied investments in art and design are functioning as incubators for artists. Kinestic Khoos, for example, were first presented in 2015 at Design Days Dubai through Tashkeel's participation. Saeed was one of the original Latifa College "eleven", the artists who studied with Sheikha Lateefa bint Maktoum, who later founded Tashkeel on the site of their former art school.

Salem Al Mansoori showed 3D-printed sculptures of the series that he showed at Ishara: Signs, Symbols and Shared Languages, the UAE Unlimited-supported exhibition focused on communication that is taking place at Concrete in Alserkal Avenue. He spoke about the sculptures – intricately patterned, pristine white objects encased, like fragile totems, within small glass vitrines – at the Ishara opening.

“My background is in computer engineering and I have a master’s in interactive design, so I wanted to write a computer program that effectively takes a piece of text, and creates a sculpture from it,” he said.

Al Mansoori would read aloud a text and assign parameters to its reading – the tempo, the rise and fall of his voice – that would be translated into an algorithm. That algorithm was then used to generate the 3D-printed objects, so that each sculpture is in fact a direct record of a poem.

"The texts I chose were Hassan Sharif's Going Inside, in which he tries to define what being an artist is," Al Mansoori said. "I also chose Abbas Kiarastomi's In The Dictionary, in which he argues that in any dictionary, the definition of nothing should be the definition of everything."

Other artists include Aljoud Lootah, Roudha Alshamsi, Zeinab Alhashemi, and Azza Al Qubaisi. The event is part of a larger initiative called UAE Design Stories exhibitions, whose next event will be held at the London Design Festival in September. That exhibition, Nomadism: Yesterday & Now, will show newly commissioned work by the same cohort of designers.

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Read more:

10@10 podcast: The UAE arts scene with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi

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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”