Art Dubai Commission 2021

At the centre of our not-for-profit programme is Art Dubai Commissions, a commissioning platform that invites artists to produce site-specific works, further enhancing the cultural landscape and supporting artistic production by local and international artists.

The 2021 Art Dubai Commission theme under the curation of Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez focuses on environmental and ecological considerations and topical concerns of the current times we are living in. After the postponed 2020 edition of the Art Dubai due to the pandemic and a year that has been like no other in our lifetimes, the programme will give its attention and space to one invited artist, Charwei Tsai. Tsai with her contemplative yet deeply situated and collaborative practice is at the forefront of critically reflecting the actual moment. Tsai will created an installation in collaboration with Emirates-based craftswomen from Al Ghadeer UAE Crafts, which will be presented at the heart of the fair.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

Nataša is an interdependent curator, editor and writer. Among the exhibitions she curated are Contour Biennale 9: Coltan as Cotton (2019, Mechelen), Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France (1970s-1980s) at LaM, Lille and Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid (2019, with Giovanna Zapperi), Show me your archive and I will tell you who is in power at Kiosk, Ghent (2017, with Wim Waelput), Let’s Talk about the Weather at the Sursock Museum, Beirut and Times Museum, Guangzhou (2016 and 2018, with Nora Razian), Resilience. U3 – Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia at MSUM, Ljubljana (2013). She was co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2010–12). She is chief editor of Versopolis Review, and was chief editor of the Manifesta Journal (2012-14) and of L’Internationale Online (2014-2017). She curates the project Not Fully Human, Not Human At All, organized by KADIST, Paris (2017-2021). She is co-founder of the Initiative for practices and visions of radical care, with Elena Sorokina.

In 2021 she was nominated as Cultural Programmes Manager at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Charwei Tsai

Charwei Tsai was born in Taipei and currently lives and works between Taipei and Saigon. Tsai graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in Industrial Design and Art & Architectural History in 2002, and completed the postgraduate research program at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2010. Interested in examining the relationship between humans and nature, Tsai reflects on the geographical and social complexities among cultural beliefs, spirituality, and transience. In some of her recent work, Tsai develops performances where she draws mantras or sutras, such as The Heart Sutra — a core element of Mahayana Buddhist thought that relies on the theory of “emptiness,” — on the plants, leaves, and bark of the trees in specific locations. The sutra talks about how all material phenomena exist interdependently, and therefore do not exist as separate entities or in a subjective role, and how all things are in a constant state of flux, and nothing remains the same.