Three angular aluminium figures fight over a chair, with their flat profiles intertwining to compose its seat. A painting of a broken sofa adorns a nearby wall. Fat ceramic ellipses and colourful obelisks watch in silent attention.
The pieces aren’t there by accident, circumstance or twist of fortune. It’s no furniture derby, nor an auction of tat. The venue is the Arsenale Sale d’Armi in Venice. And the arrangement is the product of meticulous design. It forms the UAE National Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition running from 9th May to 22nd November as part of the Venice Biennale 2015.
The UAE is a country in the throes of phenomenal change at lightning speed. Collective memory is a useful anchor, even if the narrator leaves it to the audience to connect all the dots.
The thought provoking chair is courtesy of veteran UAE artist Abdulrahman Zainal, and was created in 1980. The sofa with the almost Lego-esque appeal was painted by Mohammed Al Qasab in 1989. He’s yet another multi-disciplinary artist from the UAE, known for brushstrokes bursting with colour. The ceramic objects are the work of Salem Jawhar, an old hand at turning clay into expositions of abstract beauty. The curator behind this enterprise is Sheikha Noor Al-Qasimi, who was tasked by the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation with assembling an exhibit that could represent UAE art’s many contours.
It wasn’t the easiest of briefs. Al-Qasimi took recourse to the public archives of the Emirates Fine Arts Society (EFAS), a not-for profit concern founded in 1980s Sharjah. In its glory days, the EFAS was the only game in town, serving as incubator, supporter, exhibition organiser and nurturer, all in one. Times have moved on, but the venerable institution continues being a detailed archive of the UAE’s fertile cultural soil even from decades back.
Al-Qasimi pored over reams of articles, writings and back catalogues. She delved through old interviews and personal notebooks to piece together an often obscured historical record of the UAE’s contemporary art scene. The result of her diligence is the “1980 – Today: Exhibitions in the United Arab Emirates” showcase. Around a 100 works are chosen from 15 artists spanning 40 years: Ahmed Al Ansari, Moosa Al Halyan, Mohammed Al Qassab, Abdul Qader Al Rais, Abdullah Al Saadi, Mohammed Abdullah Bulhiah, Salem Jawhar, Mohammed Kazem, Dr Najat Meky, Abdulraheem Salim, Ahmed Sharif, Hassan Sharif, Obaid Suroor, Dr Mohamed Yousif, and Abdulrahman Zainal have all made the cut.
Surrounded by avant garde contemporary art, the UAE Pavilion seems – well, old. Some of the pieces have lost their lustre and developed fine patinas. Others seem like they might have been excavated in Mohenjo-Daro just the other week. That’s all deliberate though, and there is gravitas aplenty to match the age.
Al-Qasimi recognised that the net sum of the UAE’s art evolution couldn’t be explained without establishing a backstory. All the works displayed are examples of contemporary art, but most date back a decade or four. Small wonder, for many of the artists in the Venetian showcase were already in their twenties before the UAE was welded together from disparate trucial states in 1971.
Though far younger than the artists she has curated, Al-Qasimi herself is a product of the Sharjah Biennale, a well-recognised art expo in the emirate of Sharjah that’s been a regular feature of the regional art calendar for the past 22 years. Her father H.H Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi is a poet, author and playwright. He also happens to be the ruler of Sharjah.
Fertile cultural grounds all around, then. And the 15 artists chosen were selected on their contribution towards tilling that cultural soil in decades previous. These pioneers took UAE art around the world, exhibiting at well-attended vernissages and exhibitions from Cairo to Paris. The selection process was daunting, but the result is thought provoking, even though some of pieces Al-Qasimi originally wanted are lost. Some made it to collections in Iraq and were scattered during the wars. Others were damaged in storage – there are tales of a painting with a hole in it.
There is no chronological tyranny to Al-Qasimi’s curation. She simply tracked down the pieces she needed, and had them accompany one another in a confined area. It’s difficult at first to find a system at work. Then, the eye is drawn to the oblique interplay between the works as they stand silently surrounded by the naked brick walls of the Arsenale. The process of dialogue between the pieces creates new art from old as it unveils hitherto obfuscated links between them. And that’s exactly what Al-Qasimi wanted. She says the exhibit invites viewers to make connections between objects to dig out the collective memory they represent.
This, beyond doubt, is the UAE’s most robust presence at the Venice Biennale. The first foray was an almost cursory solo exhibition by Lamya Gargash. In 2011, the artists on display extended to three. 2013 saw the exhibit shrink back to a single artist, albeit one who fused technology and the mythology of the sea in a powerful 360 degree projection navigable via GPS coordinates.
It’s an exhibit that does the UAE proud. Small wonder then that a pantheon of luminaries showed up to officially cut the ribbon, led by H.E. Sheikh Nahyan Mubarak Al Nahyan, UAE Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development. The UAE Ambassador to Rome was present, as was the UAE Consul General in Milan.
The exhibit couldn’t have come at a better time. For the UAE is a country in the throes of phenomenal change at lightning speed, making the present generation a target for anomie. Collective memory is a useful anchor, even if the narrator leaves it to the audience to connect all the dots.
Fitting too that the UAE has saved its retrospective for the Venice Biennale, which itself dates back to 1895. It offers the curious contradiction of being the oldest non-commercial art exhibition for contemporary art. And just like the exhibition that houses it, the UAE Pavilion too explores the tension between past and present to generate a compelling narrative for the future.
