Perhaps the best thing about Emirati Expressions is how it takes a strong premise and develops it in a way that is legible to the public.
Indeed, the questions of the “public” and “legibility” are signal concerns within the show.
By looking at social clubs as a historic and region-specific model for exhibiting art to specific communities, the show’s co-curators Maisa Al Qassimi and Reem Fadda suggest that artwork can be housed in other places than fine galleries and can have multiple (and engaged) audiences.
At Manarat Al Saadiyat, where the show opens tomorrow, much of the work documents different places where the public gather.
Dubai-based artist Lamya Gargesh shows photographs of the interiors of the clubs, while Sharjah-based Ammar Al Attar exhibits a series of images of temporary mosques found in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain – only the presence of prayer mats facing in the direction of Mecca indicates that the room is a mosque.
He also shows an image of sebeel, public spouts common in the Middle East that provide free water for drinking or washing.
The photograph, installed in 1:1 perspective on a wall, shows the bright, geometric tiling that usually announces the presence of a sebeel as well as, if one looks closer, the trompe l’oeil spouts, which here appear squished.
It’s an elegant, seamless play between the two-dimensionality of Arabic art and the perspectivism of conventional photography.
Dubai artist Hind bin Demaithan, meanwhile, inverts the idea of a majlis – typically a place where people come together to talk – and creates a space where visitors can take a texting break, add images to the exhibition’s Snapchat account, or look through the lens of a camera installed within the majlis.
Though verging on the gimmicky, bin Demaithan’s project underscores how new technologies atomise and break up the communality of public space – a project of publichood in which art galleries have historically participated.
There is something subversive in Fadda and Al Qassimi looking at “pre-museum” models for exhibiting and viewing art that is also indicative of contemporary art constantly challenging itself on its own rarefied public.
Emirati Expressions engages with this self-scrutiny, but rather than putting social clubs forward as a lost idyll of art exhibited to the community, the interactive aspect adds a spirit of engagement with the public.
Dubai’s Zeinab Al Hashemi, for example, used discarded camel leather to create what Fadda calls a “futuristic landscape of a desert” (Fadda relays Al Hashemi’s line: “No camels were harmed in the making of the work.”).
Viewing the angular sculpture, then sitting down on the rough camel hide, entail two completely different experiences of the work. One rarely touches the tough hide of a camel; they mostly remain images – their tactility bounded off from our perception, and here returned to us.
In Nasir Nasrallah’s installation one can write a postcard and pop it in the postbox to send it to the artist. Nasrallah, a Sharjah artist, also shows an installation of other postcard correspondence he has struck up with random recipients: a wall-size display of communication writ both small and large. He has also installed postboxes in the Indian Club and the Writers’ Union.
Similarly, Abu Dhabi’s Alia Lootah, who used photographs from the Armed Forces Officers’ Club archives as the models for her smoky, black-and-white paintings, and has exhibited one of her works in the Club itself.
The engagement with the clubs is key: the social clubs, as the room devoted to their archives and current activities suggests, are not only an historical but an continuing part of life in this region.
Most refreshingly, one of the things this exhibition does nicely is not to frame “Emiratiness” in a romanticised hue but to look at the varied communities that comprise UAE identity, and, indeed to broaden them: from armed officers and writers to regatta watchers, gallery spectators – and artists.
artslife@thenational.ae
