New exhibition at Dubai’s The Farjam Foundation showcases history of Emirati art

The show 1971 at DIFC takes its title from the year the Emirates were unified – which Farhad Farjam, founder of the Farjam Foundation, sees as seminal not only for the history of the UAE, but also for its art scene.

Pink Bedroom by Lamya Gargash. Courtesy Lamya Gargash

In the past year there has been a flurry of international interest in contemporary and post-war art from the Gulf.

This includes the Venice Biennale pavilion curated by Sheikha Hoor Al Qassimi, which looked at historical works from the region, and the current exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London of works from the Sharjah-based Barjeel Foundation.

In the same spirit, the Farjam Foundation presents 1971, a new exhibition of Emirati work.

The show at DIFC takes its title from the year the Emirates were unified – which Farhad Farjam, founder of the Farjam ­Foundation, sees as seminal not only for the history of the UAE, but also for its art scene.

It seeks to demonstrate the history and the breadth of work produced in the region, from photography to painting and sculpture.

"Painting and photography tell a story about a specific time or a specific place," says Munira Al Sayegh, the programs officer of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, who led a tour of 1971 for the foundation's monthly "First Wednesdays" series of talks.

“The works in this exhibition are very diverse and a fantastic example of what kinds of Emirati and Arab Gulf work exists. It sews up all the generational gaps.”

The exhibition includes work from established figures such as Hussain Sharif, one of the original “Five” conceptual artists who worked in the region in the 1980s, to younger artists such as 23-year-old Oman-based photographer Anas Al Dheeb and artist Sheikha Alyazia bint Nahyan al Nahyan.

The standout among them is Lamya Gargash, who is based in Dubai and represented the UAE at the country's first Venice Biennale pavilion in 2009. She will also be included in the fourth edition of Emirati Expressions, which opened last Thursday at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi and runs until March 31.

At Farjam, she shows her signature large-scale photographs of interiors: an abandoned room, with curtains fallen on the floor and a dried-out palm tree in the garden beyond; a pink bedroom with ostensibly opulent features that looks dust-ridden and damp.

Al Sayegh notes that Gargash “focuses on interiors to define what we are. Everyone looks at the outside and how fast the outside is changing, but she looks inside people’s homes. Are the interiors still the same? Are they changing as well?”

Al Dheeb’s stunning photographs, meanwhile, show traditional scenes infused with drama. In one image, taken in Salalah, a fisherman trawling a full net grimaces at the camera as a flock of seagulls soars just above his head.

In another a young boy reads while sitting in a stack of industrial pipes, his arched back matching the curve of the circular tube. Al Dheeb says he asked the boy to crawl into the tubing, which lay beside a road being built.

“For the photographs of the fishermen, I stayed with them morning and night for three days, to get to the point where they wouldn’t care if I was there and took a picture,” he says. “But with the boy, when I saw him reading I already had the image in my head of what I would take, and simply asked him to participate in the photo.”

Sharif’s work is represented by a collage, in which cut-out images and text from magazines – Marlboro cigarette adverts, images of soldiers, the bare shoulders of a black woman in African dress – form the scene of a ­robotic-looking warrior surveying a landscape. The lighter snippets of text and blue paper create the impression of the sky and clouds, the darker colouring of advertisements the land that the robot surveys.

“It’s important to note,” says Al Sayegh, “that there isn’t a history of Gulf art that’s being created. That history already exists. The difference is now people have started to look at it.”

• 1971 – Contemporary Art From the UAE runs until December 15 at The Farjam Foundation, DIFC. Visit www.farjamcollection.org for more information