Bringing unexpressed dreams into the world

The third edition of Emirati Expressions opens to the public, presenting six formerly unrealised projects from six leading Emirati artists.

Abdullah Al Saadi's long-planned project Naked Sweet Potatoes at Manarat Al Saadiyat. Courtesy Emirati Expressions

When the curator Reem Fadda began conversations with Mohammed Kazem ahead of his solo show in the UAE's national pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, she asked him simply what work he had always wanted to create but never realised. The result was Walking on Water, an installation that placed the viewer in a cylindrical pod, immersing them in the sounds and sights of an ebbing sea and leaving them disoriented, questioning their position in the world and their own sense of perception.
While that work is in place in Italy until the end of November, it has been created again specifically for UAE audiences and opens to the public tomorrow in the third instalment of Emirati Expressions – the biennial artistic platform for national artists held at Manarat Al Saadiyat.
Kazem's work is the central point in the show subtitled Realised, which Fadda has been working on for a year. After helping Kazem to realise his dream, she conducted a series of studio visits to other seminal artists from his generation and unearthed their unfulfilled dreams, making them a reality in this exhibition.
"These are intellectuals, they are philosophers and they have been thinking long and hard about their societies for years," says Fadda. "These ideas are like babies that the artists have given birth to and have been waiting to show to the world."
In this minimal exhibition, Fadda has pared down the volumes of ideas and projects from her six chosen artists to just one powerful statement from each. The exhibition is therefore understated and clean but highly impactful, with Fadda making use of the tried-and-tested motto "less is more". "I have always believed in that," she says. "You don't need many pieces to say a lot, these projects really say a lot already."
Whether it is the two-and-a-half metre identical aluminium sculptures by Layla Juma, a trained architect and a largely unknown artist, that stand in the entrance resembling 3-D sketches that play with the ideals of geometry and perfection, or in the adjoining room where Abdullah Al Saadi's life-long project titled Naked Sweet Potatoes are realised in highly polished pieces of gold jewellery, the statement that Fadda was trying to underline in this exhibition was one that goes against the grain of what most people say about the art scene in the UAE.
"The UAE has a very sophisticated art scene that is well established and has its own autonomous language. It is not sheltered, these artists are not compromised and they have been questioning themselves and their art for many years. Within the art you will see the local influences but you will also see universal tropes and concerns, which I think makes this art even stronger.
"What we are hoping to emphasise within this exhibition is that it is not the artists but the infrastructure that is new and now we have the tools to present the full scale and vision in the right way."
Al Saadi was one of the artists represented at the 2011 Venice Biennale, but the depth of his project was not fully presented. The room, filled with 24 illuminated columns that house his sweet potatoes in different pieces of gold jewellery, is explained in the Archive Room at the rear of the exhibition. Here, Fadda and the assistant curator Maisa Al Qassimi have collated a selection of Al Saadi's work that includes an alphabet the artist has created based on the shapes of the sweet potato and an entire journal of his ode to the oddly shaped tuber, which he has indexed in endless different designs and describes as having a symbiotic relationship with the people who grow it.
"He is trying to capture the special meaning of the sweet potato and farm it into our lives," says Fadda.
The other projects include a series of paintings from Mohamed Al Mazrouei who uses Christian iconography to talk about societies and the ethics of communal living and a performance piece from Ebtisam Abdulaziz called The Bubble.
Abdulaziz is probably best-known for her 2007 piece Autobiography, where she donned a full bodysuit covered in the numbers of her bank account and posed in public places in Sharjah and Dubai. Here she has created a perspex bubble, placed it outside the Manarat Al Saadiyat and filmed herself covering the interior with blue paint. She was influenced by the French artist Yves Klein, who famously worked with a singular blue pantone in most of his work.
"She uses the idea that Yves Klein liberated his painting with monotone blue and then poses the question that if she coloured her world with blue would she also liberate it?" explains Fadda.
The final piece in the exhibition is a monumental photograph by the land artist Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim. The photograph depicts a mountain in Khor Fakkan on the UAE's east coast with a hole carved into it to potentially reveal the sunset. "This is an artist who lived and worked with minimal support on the east coast and this is how avant garde ideas thrived in that society," says Fadda. "This is not about skyscrapers and malls, this is avant-gardism in a really developed society."
And it is this point that Fadda and Al Qassimi really want to drive home in Emirati Expressions: Realised. "These six artists are from a specific generation and it is important that they realise these dreams but we also want to present that Emirati art is not new, it has been there for years, we just haven't been looking," says Al Qassimi.
• Emirati Expressions: Realised opens tomorrow and runs until ­January 18 next year Visit saadiyatculturaldistrict.ae for details
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