Imago Mundi: Amid Desert and Future --Contemporary Artists from the UAE and Bahrain
This intro text by Suzy Sikorski was included in the Imago Mundi Project she co-curated for the UAE and Bahraini coverage.
Imago Mundi is the collection of works commissioned and collected by Luciano Benetton on his travels around the world, involving, on a voluntary and non-profit basis, established and emerging artists from many different countries. Each of them has created a work whose only restriction is its 10x12 cm format, contributing to the creation of a remarkable artistic geography.
The collection, under the auspices of the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche (established upon the wishes of the Benetton family to support and raise awareness of the wealth of landscape, cultural and artistic heritage), has no commercial ambitions, but aims to unite the diversities of our world in the name of common artistic experience. The goal is to catalogue works, inspirations and ideas, in order to pass down to future generations the widest possible mapping of the situation of human cultures at the start of the third millennium.
Since the founding of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1971, the country has transitioned from a traditional pearling economy into a futuristic, global metropolis in arts and architecture. For over 200 years it has been a cosmopolitan region that has welcomed migrating tribes, and families from both Eastern and Western cultures to take part in business and cultural markets.
Comprised of seven Emirates, the UAE is led by ruling families who are passionate in fostering a local awareness of the arts. These initiatives are taught and promoted in the classroom and displayed at exhibitions in local cultural institutes, museums and art venues. Emiratis represent 10% of the national population and are passionate and equipped with the vision to cultivate a dynamic art scene that blends the regional and local arts, languages and histories.
I was invited to be a co-curator for the Imago Mundi project during my Fulbright Scholarship research from October 2016 to July 2017. Expanding on my undergraduate thesis on art history of the UAE from the 1970s until present, I explored three generations of local Emirati artists and how they have been inspired by and are fostering a regional art scene. This involved time spent in the Emirates Fine Art Society in Sharjah speaking with their chairman to interview a range of artists in mixed media, conceptual and painting traditions across the country. The artists I have chosen for Imago Mundi reflect the diversity in artistic disciplines, involvement amongst different generations and references to both influences in Eastern and Western traditions. Whether inspired by Western art such as readymades, abstract expressionism, and pop art, or traditional Arab geometric and calligraphic patterns, these artists are infusing their own history and language within global art historical discourse and exploring universal themes such as alienation, destruction, reflection, and nostalgia.
Today, under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Sharjah houses over 16 museums in contemporary art, Islamic art and natural sciences. This year Sharjah was just awarded as UNESCO’s World Book Capital in its efforts to further education.[1]The Sharjah Arts Foundation has hosted the Sharjah Biennial (founded in 1993), an internationally acclaimed cultural event engaging regional and international artists, writers and curators. Together with commercial art fairs such as Abu Dhabi Art fair (founded in 2009) and Art Dubai (founded in 2007), and curated projects and biennials at the museum level, a younger generation of artists are inspired by the importance art has been given in the community. Students have the opportunity to attend art programs in universities such as American University of Sharjah’s College of Architecture, Arts and Design and Zayed University’s College of Arts and Creative Enterprises. Abu Dhabi’s future Saadiyat Island Cultural District will soon serve as a beacon for dialogue between East and Western audiences under the future projects such as Louvre Abu Dhabi, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum.
Despite advances in the growth of the local UAE artistic traditions, an influx in globalized art trends over the past decade has made it difficult to fuse older generation of local artists and histories with the current scene. In the hopes of defining UAE culture through artistic production, curators are recognizing the fluidity of the concept ‘identity’ and the problems inherent with representing this art history seen through a single perspective. Working directly with cultural and government institutions, local curators are producing narratives that address different facets of UAE identities formation by exploring past, present and future artistic practices. Most recently, Sheikha Hoor al Qasimi, daughter of the ruler of Sharjah and President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, curated “1980-Today: Exhibitions in the United Arab Emirates” (2016) at the Emirati Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This exhibition explores UAE art history since the 1980s, and recounts how three generations of artists have contributed to the intellectual and cultural production and challenged preconceived notions of what is to be considered “art” in the Western art historical sense.
Despite promoting itself as a timeless, yet traditional space and redefining orientalist discourse, the modernization project of the UAE has impacted how it articulates its cultural heritage. As Sheikha Hoor al Qasimi states in discussing Paul Connerton’s How Societies Remember:
Our experience of the present largely depends on our knowledge of the past. We experience our present in a way that is connected to and references past events and objects. We have difficulty extracting our past from our present: not simply because present factors tend to influence—some might say distort our recollections of the past, but also because past factors tend to influence or distort our experience of the present.[2]
These exhibitions reassess UAE art historical narratives and allow for an authentic dialogue within the Emirati community. Although local exhibitions allow a space for Emiratis to assert their presence within the globalized landscape, the local community has expressed differing views on the originality of the artwork and its recognition of the work as part of a larger universal “fine art” category (translated in Arabic as “al-funn al-jamil”) across each generation.
During the 1970s although the education system allowed artists the chance to pursue visual arts in painting, ceramics, architecture and traditional calligraphy, the role of an artist within society was not highly regarded as a professional career. Artists were either self-taught by local arts teachers in traditional calligraphy or realist art, or sought an arts education abroad. Recognizing the need for greater artistic production, the UAE provided government scholarships for local artists to receive a fine arts degree from abroad. Graduating from fine art schools in Cairo, Baghdad and London, these artists returned to the UAE and eager to continue practicing in their community.
In 1980 the Emirates Fine Arts Society (EFAS) was formed as the first non-profit artist organization that provided arts training courses and workshops for both self-taught and arts graduates. Not only did artists transform local artistic techniques with Western inspired subjects and formats, but recently immigrated Arabs also began to infuse their own local traditional styles and exhibit their works as members of the EFAS. Interdisciplinary in the cultural and intellectual production of art, the EFAS incorporated multiple forms such as painting, sculpting, photography, Arabic calligraphy and decoration, ceramic art and caricature. Respected artists from the EFAS include famous ones such as Hassan Sharif and Mohammed Kazem as well as featured Imago Mundi artists Mona Al Khaja and Karima Al Shomely. Equipped with an art historical background of the preceding generations from engaging in conversations and reading art catalogues, textbooks or newspapers, the younger generation began to incorporate conceptual analysis and descriptions with each formal experimentation. These artists began to focus on these particular themes such as nationalism, traditional Islamic design, the environment and sustainability, globalization, and migration, while having the freedom in experimenting with different media, including photography, paint, embroidery fabrics, and found objects.
Amidst the growing commercial art scene, an increased level of arts appreciation through education programs have influenced a rising third generation of artists today. Educational resources are found at art fairs, galleries and museums. Whether exposed to arts through grade school programs, or having an artist within the family, artists graduating within the last decade are equipped with advanced arts practices and have the ability to visit cultural foundations, museums, and attend lectures at cultural events. These artists are equipped with university educations from either locally or abroad that teach fine arts practices in digital photography, mixed media installations, painting and video art, Western art historical genres, and curatorial practice. Witnessing the transformation of the country, albeit on a smaller scale in spatial and commercial development than the first and second generation, recently graduated artists are producing work that suggests how to identify with a heritage that seems disconnected within a rapidly urbanized landscape.
I am hopeful this next coming decade will ensure more appreciation in cultivating an art scene that fosters a greater awareness and critique on the evolution of art history in the region. These recent graduates are eager to build on their predecessors’ artistic practices and systematize these histories by curating, researching and interviewing locals and better analyzing the current artistic trends within a larger landscape across generations.
[1]http://en.unesco.org/news/sharjah-named-world-book-capital-2019
[2]Exhibition catalogue, “1980-Today: Exhibitions in the United Arab Emirates.” Excerpt from Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).