After investing in art infrastructure, Dubai grows on its own – ARTnews.com

IMarch when I was writing this, Dubai grows like a cat after taking a nap. Vaccinations are being rolled out at a blazing pace, and everywhere there is a kind of manic and capricious optimism. After spending 15 years in Dubai and New York at the end of January, I returned to my hometown. I should have come back sooner. When I was in college, I came back in the summer. In the fierce years after the financial crisis, cities were constantly reforming themselves. Every time I landed, I saw stories and behind-the-scenes stories about new roads, new buildings, new cities. Things are now different. The city is growing on its own.

Things got back almost in earnest, so it was easy to get used to the art scene. Artist Lawrence Abhamdan launched a series of artist critiques each month. I attended twice and was moved by the depth, rigor and generosity of the discussion. I started taking dance body online classes at the Bombay Critical Research and Analysis Institute and wondered what something similar would look like in Dubai. In most cases, I tried to sit with as many new people as possible (mainly art or adjacent to art), and it’s as fun as being overwhelmed after the discourse dead air in New York. -I’m grateful to have left before the NFT boom.

The first harvest of the gallery show I saw here is with the exception of the Gray Noise Gallery Charbel-joseph Boutros, where the artist built a mausoleum in the art fair booth built for his dealer and thus for the gallery. I was almost disappointed, the fair and commercial scene.And there were promising shows, even if they were uneven Afra Alda Helicopter The Green Art Gallery has one of the most amazing works. The door and fan light frame with the panels and glass removed, but the hinges and handle mechanism remain the same (Does not exist but exists, 2020). I can’t stop thinking about this work, partly because I feel how the city’s art infrastructure is working now. Everything is assembled and participants are ready to make it on their own initiative.

In February, I had to visit Abu Dhabi, an hour’s drive away, with my father to see a show of Filipino sailors and domestic workers in Hong Kong, show the results of the PCR test and enter the city. (Later, I saw the story of Raleigh Hariri’s new book War and Trade Sinews, About sailors stuck in the United Arab Emirates, is widely read locally. ) I visited Louvre Abu Dhabi, which has been significantly re-hung since my last visit. The museum wasn’t excited, but it was still beautiful. Rare emptiness. My father wondered why there were no more Indian relics. Recalling the unraveling of the Qatar detent, when I first visited in 2017, I look forward to visiting their magnificent Islamic Arts Museum, which has radically changed the way I think about heritage.

Returning to Dubai, it went online last year in late March, but has been reopened as one of the first face-to-face events on the world’s art circuits since the pandemic began, a simplification of the city’s annual Art Dubai Fair. A version of the version has been introduced. With a reduced 6-day version with 50 galleries (about half the usual size), the fair returned to Dubai’s financial district, the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), and began in 2007 as the Gulf Art Fair. I was in Riyadh in this year’s edition, and I heard that the new location, along with the Covid-19 restrictions and the period of mourning for the people after Sheikh’s death, gave it a rather barren corporate feel. “I felt the energy at the 2019 fair was vibrant and electrical,” artist Lena Cassier told me. “This year, the grassroots didn’t feel or feel like a sales event,” said Alexei Afanasiev, an independent cultural adviser, although booth presentations and sales seemed weak, “Art Dubai. The biggest advantage of 2021 is that it really happened. “

“The fair cannot simply be compared to the previous year,” Afanassiev said. “Of course, there was no big fat party or free flow of champagne. At such a reunion in the art world, the social distance was tough, but everyone could keep wearing the mask. I think the return to DIFC somehow positions the fair as a more business-oriented event and resembles other fairs like Freeze London with a tent structure. Five no longer like Disneyland. It’s not a gathering in the ballroom of the Star Hotel, it’s great. “

Everyone praised the Art Dubai team for accomplishing such a difficult feat. Chris Fussner of the Cebu-based gallery Tropical Futures Institute returned to the fair with low expectations given the economic uncertainties of the time, but excited to return to the fair again after a long pandemic year. 2019 Art Dubai is the gallery’s first fair and relies heavily on the international collectors it attracts as a young business with a low collector base. This time, we placed two works in the institution, including Art Jameel, a regional power, but they did not sell well. “I was worried about the social situation, but I have to come out someday … I think Dubai is a long-term participation,” said Fastener.

The art scene here for years The fair’s longtime director Antonia Carver ran it more like an institutional umbrella than a commercial event, by Art Dubai (and to a lesser extent, a gallery in the city). It was fixed. Over the years, the Fair Residency and Education Program has done a lot to develop the local scene, but the introduction of the sector for 20th century masters in the region has been introduced in Arab, South Asia, Iran, and of that era, did a lot to support the art market in East Africa. In return for all its gifts, Fair always seemed to accurately show the feudal kind of loyalty-criticizing that it felt redundant (and still felt)-and it Created a disproportionately weighted art calendar towards March. But lately, I feel that the fair has become less relevant to the city of Dubai as it has become increasingly important to the international art world as an information center for art in the surrounding area. This feels like a healthy change.

Over the past few years, the fair has played a role in the enthusiastic period of institutional building. Carver currently oversees Art Jameel, the flagship exhibition space of the Saudi Arabia’s giant Jameel Foundation on the Dubai waterfront. Nowadays, everyone here is looking to Saudi Arabia (and scrambling to represent Saudi Arabian artists). At the large public art festival in Riyadh in March, I was impressed by the gritty energy of the vast city and the art scene of the first Ad-Diriyah Biennale curated by Philip Tinari in December. .. Soon the huge Hayy: Creative Hub will open.

During the pandemic, Dubai-based institutions such as the Art James and the Alserkal Arts Foundation have invested resources in Zoom, and recently face-to-face talks and panels have been held to discuss the place, the region, and its politics. Did. Repression and exclusion, and many other topics, were previously out of scope, diagonally rather than directly. Much has happened in the way of conversation, but rarely in pixels or printed matter on record. There’s plenty of new artist groups, grassroots initiatives, and project space (from the only young Emiratis so far who can afford it so far). They are concentrated in Sharjah and Abu Dhabi and play a role in countering Dubai’s market-based dominance. Despite the collective desire to have an art space independent of the efforts of all these institutions that brand and claim responsibility for cultural works, there is little funding for art.

For a long time, the art and writing produced by the non-citizens of Dubai is not the alienation of the diaspora from its ideal hometown, but even far away, the dissonance can be felt in what you now call your hometown. It was defeated by the idea of ​​belonging. A place where you may have been born and lived for the rest of your life, but will be expelled when your visa expires. According to citizens, there was a longing to be recognized as a hyphen emirati, not to mention rights and privileges.

However, it seems that people have overcome it, probably with the introduction of the Golden Visa Program in 2019, which allows them to stay for 10 years. It is automatically renewed and acts as a permanent resident for all but your name. You can apply, but like many other regions in the region, cultural category approval is not a portfolio, Wasta, As we say here, the Arabic word for “who you know”. I met an artist curator who applied earlier this year and was rejected in just four days. He is now back in the United States and is generously funded by the government under Sheikh Salama’s residence to obtain MFA. (Initially, this residence and fellowship was limited to UAE citizens, but as in many other cases, it is now expanded to include all residents.) Details are ambiguous, but Abu Dhabi Recently announced a new cultural visa.

“How do you prevent it from being adopted? Instrumented under Aegis Is it soft power? “

Today, Dubai’s artists, writers and curators are, among other things, the Indian Ocean as a place of eccentric consideration of the history of the excavated region and global blackness, and the Arab slaves. Sometimes called trade. , Converge. Another thing that comes to mind is the problem of terroir, what it means to produce from here, and how to avoid being adopted and instrumentalized with the support of the state’s soft power. The awkward importance of the city as a freeport, which tends to be traced back to artists like Hassan Sharif in response to the early consumer boom, remains popular. It also traces the history of migrant families across the Arabian Sea and other oceans. Young South Asians in the art scene are awakened to the fact that they (probably not so young anymore) are the demographic majority of the city (and the entire Emirates) and are producing more and more works. Excavate it more and more.

In 1986, Mombasa’s Salim Abdallah Salim (aka Sal Davis) released a promotional music video for the World Chess Championship. It’s a real Yeho energy banger, waving the Emirati flag on all the sun, sand, and jet skis, saying, “Go back to Dubai / there’s the sun, it’s always shining there / on the smile of the face. The children’s / Dubai that reminds me to go home is mine. “

The funny thing is that there is no chess anywhere in the video. It’s been in my head since I got home. Dubai is mine. I miss my partner and friends, but it feels good to be at home.

A version of this article appeared in the June / July 2021 issue. ARTnews, With the title “If You Build It …”.