It's hard to believe that, one day, this will all be fields. Bay Avenue is a new district-in-the-making in Business Bay. The area has had a bunch of surprisingly decent works of public art installed to hide away the sandpit/construction site opposite before it's turned into rolling grass lawns.
The 12 UAE-based artists, several of whom are Emirati, were each given Dh5,000 by Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and Dubai Properties Group to realise their project, under the theme of 'This is Dubai, the City that I Lived'.
The words 'Public art billboards' can strike terror into many-a-heart, a 'respond to Dubai with art' theme is the sort of thing that can go very wrong.
But the artists that Business Avenue have worked with have met the task head on, and there's a number of rather impressive pieces here.
Take Darwin Guevarra. Here's a picture (courtesy of
) of him looking quite intense from a few years ago:
Guevarra always works with found objects and materials. For his billboard, he's created a blackened collage of Dubai from bits of metal, cardboard and even discarded signs he's found around the city.
"This took about 10 days to make," he told us, when we dropped by at the unveiling. He opened the small door in the middle of the peace, revealing a simple painting of the sun cresting a dune. The piece implies that, in the assembling of this urban landscape, the desert and its simple beauty got locked away.
Next we had a little chat with Sandra and Lucas Surtie, who had worked together on two of the pieces.
This one, by Lucas, looks remarkably like the branding for London 2012 Olympics. The artist agrees, and used to work for Wolf Ollins, the team that came up with the design (after they'd done it, he says). Still good looking graphics, we say:
The pieces are up there until the end of the year. More info
... Bay Avenue is well signposted in Business Bay.
