A commentary on recent exposure of UAE graduate artists

Laura Trelford

Lamya Gargash was the first UAE artist that came onto my radar in 2007 when I saw her work exhibited at a group show Life Drawing at The Third Line in Dubai. She had recently returned to the UAE after completing an MFA at Central St Martin’s in London. I went on to meet her professor and fellow photographer Tarek Al-Ghoussein and colleague at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) Mark Pilkington, after which followed a close relationship with both the current students, recent alumni and art professor community here in the UAE at AUS, College of Fine Arts in Sharjah as well as Zayed University and AUD in Dubai. Through the Deyaar Visual Arts Internship Scheme, nearly 150 students studying in these institutions have had the opportunity of working alongside Art Dubai and its participating galleries, media partners and artists in gaining vocational training and networking with the international arts community.

There have been several success stories from the internship programme in its first two years. Two of the strongest interns from 2008 went on the radio with Siobhan Leyden on Dubai Eye 103.8 Fm to represent the scheme. Yasmeen Abuamer (AUD graduate) went on to join the START team as a coordinator. Reem Al Ghaith brought her portfolio of artwork to Art Dubai to show to her allocated gallery, Oredaria Arti Contemporanee from Rome. They proceeded to offer her an exhibition in their gallery in Italy and took her work to other art fairs. It was around this time that her graduating show from AUS which brought enough recognition for her to be chosen as a featured artist in the 2008 Dubai Next exhibition on Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. She most recently exhibited her work in the 9th Sharjah Biennial (SB 9). Her installation at SB9 summarized her preoccupations as an artist and graphic designer: a mixed media investigation into construction practice and the loss of UAE heritage.

Copyright: Sami Al Turki, 2009

Sami Al Turki, a recent graduate from AUD who was born in Jeddah, interned with Art Dubai in 2008 and 2009. In his first year Sami was allocated to Christine König gallery from Vienna, who were so taken with his photography, they allowed him to exhibit his Lift series in their gallery last summer. The Lift series is an ongoing documentary project, capturing the daily lives and hopes of migrant labourers through photographs they take themselves with a disposable camera given to them by Al-Turki. He also takes portrait shots of the workers. The series, along with his graduation piece Running, are shown in the ADACH Platform for Venice and fit perfectly into Catherine David’s investigative, documentary style exposure of the UAE. He will go on to show at the School of the Visual Arts in New York this July, back with his fellow AUD graduates in a re-enactment of a highly successful exhibition Basically Human, which juxtaposes student and faculty work from AUD under the supervision of photographer and chair of the Visual Communication faculty, Roberto Lopardo.

June is the month of several graduating exhibitions across the Emirates, often taking place in commercial galleries who offer their space to young talents. The College of Fine Arts have their own gallery space where we saw Exit 4 – the final show of their fourth year of graduates since the institutions inception. Students are given the opportunity to use all the spaces within the college, often surprising visitors by exhibiting their work in corridors or outside the traditional gallery space. They are the only graduates who purely study fine arts, and many of their graduates have gone on to produce strong work.

 

One such artist is Hayat Al Suwaidi, who was part of the Shaikha Manal Award delegation, and displayed her compelling found objects from car crashes at the Dubai Ladies Club last year. She reworks bonnets, windshields and often whole carcasses of mechanical wrecks she finds and takes from the side of the road or garages in Sharjah. Exhibited with the readymades are videos and sound installations that bring the horrific scenes to life. Hayat was invited by Art Dubai and Thinking Cloud to talk about her work in the Art Park Talks series at Art Dubai 2009.

AUS graduates took over Total Arts at The Courtyard this June, exhibiting primarily graphic and multimedia design in their senior show. Students displayed their skills for a variety of future vocations, from creative advertising slogans to entrepreneurial business plans for festivals, companies and publications. The strongest work was often the most simple. For example, Noor Al Khaja’s eloquent graphic pieces Document Palestinian History juxtaposed texts in different languages relevant to the region, making marks of great poignancy which erase those beneath, making all unintelligible and denying any possibility of clarification. Hala Al-Ani brought her ideas into three-dimensions through her project Provisions for the Future, which displayed divided cubes representing concrete, wire and cloth in a hard lined sculptural form intending to question the concept of utopia.

The strongest representation of Zayed University students was certainly in the exhibition Emerge: Ways of Worldmaking in Venice (see interview in Debate section of this journal), where the notion of being a woman growing up in Dubai is explored to the full. Arwa Fuad Bukhash’s Talented, Outspoken, Strong and Free is representative of students expressing themselves through their work – other pieces like Alia Khalid’s etchings or Nayla Salem Al Manea’s Spider Series are simply abstract, beautifully executed forms. They express a certain prowess in a number of media, printmaking, drawing and photography standing out. They also reveal that students have been lead to explore other forms of expression via a series of workshops by visiting international curators and artists, such as Kóan Jeff-Baysa who is coordinating another exhibition of UAE graduates in New York this summer at Tenri Cultural Institute. Being the first significant exposure of Zayed current students, alumni and professors outside of the UAE, the curators took the opportunity of referencing all previous shows and groups of artists that have developed over the past few years both in the work selected and the catalogue essays. Groups include the eleven graduates of Latifa College, established by Lateefa Bint Maktoum who went on to open Tashkeel as a space for artists to work, and Mizmah, a collective of current artists from Zayed Abu Dhabi campus.

Mona Al Gurg, In a Perfect World (2009)   Mona Al Gurg, In a Perfect World (2009)
Mona Al Gurg, In a Perfect World (2009)
Digital Photography Exhibited as part of Helwasa, DIFC

A small group of five visual arts graduates in Dubai who are shown in Venice, will probably have their work viewed by a greater number through their capstone project displayed in the DIFC in an exhibition entitled Halwasa, “hallucination” in Arabic. Each student has brought a personal gripe or emotion to the fore, be it anorexia, noise pollution, an illness of a close relative, children’s addition to computer games or simply the inequality of people’s lives in Dubai. The most eloquent work comes from Mona Al Gurg, a talented photographer who is preoccupied with social issues. She has done plenty of work in the social sphere, running a semester of Tuesday Group workshops for START with children with Special Needs and Autism. Al Gurg has developed a close relationship with certain children in Satwa who are lacking basic facets of life, such as a family, a home or education, and her piece In a Perfect World gives these boys a taste of these dreams, which we grow to realize are only artificially captured on film.

There are certain clear characteristics of UAE graduate artwork. Common themes include self-reflection, representation of construction workers; lower strata’s of UAE society, technology, use of Arabic typography; video and photography being the most common mediums explored. Animation and installation are growing in popularity as well. Regularly critiquing student work in universities, it is clear that students have no problem finding their own voice – growing up in the UAE immediately gives them an opinion on the visual arts and how they can play a part in how the UAE art scene develops. What needs to be worked on now is getting students to appreciate certain art historical contexts and styles to which they often refer. Many students go on to study abroad, such as Lamya Gargash in London and Salem Al Qassemi, the Chair of the Art Dubai Young Associates, starting an MFA at Rhode Island School of Design in the autumn. As the AUS students quote in their catalogue forward, ‘Intelligence plus character; the goal of a true education’: The UAE students have both and are well on their way to making a significant mark on the international arts scene.


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