Indian artist captures lives of Dubai’s migrant workers

When 28-year-old Poonam Jain arrived in Dubai from Mumbai a month ago, she imagined herself as one of the millions of anonymous migrant workers. Jain, an artist-in-residence at Art Dubai, set to work daily in a uniform, collecting and counting concrete blocks that she then cleaned, numbered by weight, and presented as a coded puzzle.


“Many workers asked me, ‘kaunsa company se’ (which company do you work for)?” Jain says. “The code symbolises a worker’s songs. To know its meaning, you need to talk to them,” she says. Over the next few weeks, she distilled the experiences of Indian labourers through evocative works such as Labour Card, which comprises two stacks of forms used to mark attendance and working hours.

Her show, Burden of Proof, is one of the highlights of the 12th edition of Art Dubai, which ran from March 21 to 24 and featured 105 galleries from 42 countries. Jain is one of the 11 international artists chosen for Art Dubai’s new non-profit Residents’ Programme. In many works, she channelled the emphasis on counting and numbering, especially in prayers, as a metaphor for the mundane and repetitive nature of manual work in an industrialised economy.

“I believe there is room for greater dialogue between art from South Asia and the Middle East. Both reflect similar issues and given the geographic proximity, I feel there is much that can be achieved on curatorial levels,” said Myrna Ayad, director of Art Dubai.

This dialogue between the Indian subcontinent and the Gulf was also evident in the textile installations of Swiss-Egyptian artist Karim Noureldin, a regular visitor to India. His two abstract pieces were made in collaboration with weavers in Jaipur and Panipat.

The other standout artist was the forgotten late sculptor Piraji Sagara (1931-2014) from Ahmedabad. Sagara made striking geometric and abstract wooden collages with burnt wood, beads, paint, sand and nails, using a blow torch.

A retrospective of 72-year-old Egyptian-Canadian artist Anna Boghiguian at the Sharjah Art Foundation captured scenes from her train journeys through India and Nepal in the 1980s. There is a palpable influence of Rabindranath Tagore’s writings in her works.

“We want to remain a meeting point for artists, gallerists, collectors, patrons and institutions from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa,” said Ayad.

(The reporter travelled at the invitation of Art Dubai)