With everything of our lives online for many months of the pandemic, and the visual becoming the video experience, a much-anticipated return to the real has the 2021 edition of Abu Dhabi Art making up for lost time, with the realisation of many of the ideas originally conceived of for the previous year’s fair. Seen as integral to the thirteenth edition of the capital’s commercial and cultural event, the press statements for this year’s fair were of this year’s choice of curators conjuring from their respective confinements a programme of possibilities that could be presented to an audience. Having relocated to the Manarat Al Saadiyat site, within touching distance of to Louvre Abu Dhabi. As with everywhere of the world, this is the UAE’s rally to re-establish its capital on the cultural calendar. Supported in recent years by critical and curatorial commentaries, Abu Dhabi Art has altered a great deal from its original incarnation at the Emirates Palace, with a host of blue-chip galleries happy to off-lot major artist’s works to a region of the Middle East, ready to acquire these art emblems as an inroad into creating their own cultural identity.

Director Dyala Nusseibeh’s maturing vision has seen her positively alter the geography of the fair in recent years. Cornering the galleries, and opening up the initial space to a wealth of newer elements, that draw on the energies of a host of curators and artists engaging with mediums that contradict and complement one another, that are closer to everything of the outside world. Nusseibeh’s invitation to artists to offer up their visions of art animates what might otherwise have suffered or succeeded by virtue of its sales.

As well as the already interconnected booths of galleries from Turin and Tehran, this year sees a programme of performances facilitated by London based curator Rose Lejeune, and an exhibition of artists, from a choice of countries and continents, curated by essayist and academic Simon Njami; works that as he explains, draw attention to the significance of music to the creative act. Suggesting, “music is rhythm. A visual experience as well. Above all, jazz is about improvisation. The experience of an exhibition should never be predetermined. It has to be a game of questions and answers.” That plays with the idea that art, like music, proposes possibilities that are memory and emotionally based, and far from fixed to the floor. Looking to the future, the Munich and New York-based curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, have been invited to unearth a new generation of artists, who are born of and belong to the UAE. There is a choice of artists who have all gone to the US to study, whilst still retaining close ties to the Emirates.

That includes Hashel Al Lamki’s acrylic canvases that easily go unnoticed, within touching distance of Maitha Abdalla bathroom tiled installation, that offers a gustier handling of paint, to the more placid pictures of Lamki; a practice that has the potential of becoming as rich as Iranian-American artist Tala Madani. Together with Christopher Benton, whose uprooted palm tree is elevated by a web of metal chains, that turns the innocuous into the incredible.

Maitha Abdalla’s performative piece cut into the wall, of her pinked out ‘dry room’, introduces something of the vim of Rose Lejeune’s choice of performative artists, who were notable for their absence. Despite that, the figure and the inclusion of figurative reconfirm the human experience. Lejeune’s choice of performers conjures their own fantastic fables that are intended to awaken the audience from the silence of seeing everything else. Performance she says “is of great interest to me because it is an increasingly important part of so many artists’ practice alongside much broader constellations of mediums, from painting to ceramics to film, drawing and installation.” It becomes part of a wider approach of how to successfully express oneself, and what Lejeune’s crop of artists offers, is the life of the party. Super Taus, is an artist, like Chinese artist Xu Zhen, who sees the collision of cultures, as a place from which to reap much reward. Sitting at a table at the art fair, waiting to give away an audience member a make-piece trophy akin to the one she received at the armory show, in New York, as a tongue-in-cheek opportunity for the audience an ad-hock experience of her new-found success. Louise Hervé and Clovis Maillet are an emerging French duo. Founders of I.I.I.I (International Institute for Important Items), their works appear as a fluid interpretation of the historical and the anthropological. Described as ‘embodying knowledge’, Hervé and Maillet appear to want to capture and recreate the past as a fluid present.

As has become characteristic of Nusseibeh’s approach to the fair in recent years, its commercial duties come accompanied by a cultural canon that carries the intellectual weight of invited curators and critics. An overlap of sales and critical commentary has taken the fair in a new direction, making the shop-front of art and objects a backdrop for a host of curated events and exhibitions, that are intended to offer a platform for the fixed as well as the fluid. Which for several years has served to cement a second identity for the fair, outside of its commitment to commodity art, of venturing into the realm of ideas and information, as the intellectual currency for greater possibilities for the fair’s longevity and influence, on a country still deciding on its cultural identity. Abu Dhabi Art 2021 sees in Africa, as with India previously, something of the new in the contemporary art world, together with international performance, that seeks to stretch the fair’s interests beyond the Middle East, and across the world. The motives and the message are admirable; the execution still needs some work.

Curator Interviews

Rose Lejeune

Rajesh Punj: What is it you want to offer an audience who may be new to the experience and experimentation of performance (especially an audience that might think of art as stationary and static)?

Rose Lejeune: This year’s programme showcases a series of performances that use a frame of storytelling and interpretation to create a series of journeys or encounters within different social or political constructs, where the audience is also implicated within the work; audiences are asked to situate themselves or to respond and participate so that they’re integrated into it rather than being passive observers. I wanted to present the live programme now as something ‘other’ from the rest of the art in the fair – not something intimidating and certainly not simply as entertainment but as something that also interacts and amplifies more static artworks. So, the works in the programme also have sculptural, film, and photographic elements; they interact and animate those elements and tell stories about them. The works are woven into the fabric of the fair, so they don’t appear as grand theatrical moments but rather as interventions or little glitches in it – for example as a strange booth or as an information stand.

Last year, in lockdown, I approached the idea of performance online in terms of thinking about the camera as at the audience. Each of the works was filmed live in a different location and then available online as a 360 film to be watched with headsets. This meant there was a kind of immersion into the work again rather than a distanced or passive viewing of it. It also allowed the artist to take the audience places they would never have been able to go to otherwise—a derelict hospital in Berlin, the emirate desert, an empty theatre in London—and to use these spaces as locations for their work in a unique way. 

RP: How do the choice of ‘actions’ and ‘happenings’, relate to and differ from the original geography of the artists, and the new location of the audience?

RL: I think this is most pertinent in the work of Rand Abdul Jabbar. I saw the first episode when it was installed in Chelsea Physic Garden, London’s oldest botanic garden, as part of the Shubbak Festival earlier in the year. The work emerged from a participatory process, in which women of the Iraqi and Arab diaspora in London engaged in conversation around the role of memory in place and history.

The performative element of the work is the personal story of London-based Syrian writer and performer Entissar Hajali’s experience of arriving in London, the re-learning of seemingly simple things like shopping and moving through the landscape, but also encounters with the river and her memories of home.

 It was envisaged by Rand as a dynamic, episodic work consisting of a series of sculptural interventions, performances and a digital archive. I invited her to update it for Abu Dhabi, which is Rand’s adopted home and we have installed the sculptures in the Botanical Garden at Umm Al Emarat Park. Three sculptural interventions are set in dialogue with the garden plants and provide sites for contemplation and reflection as well as coordinating points for a performative reading of The Climbing Vine, the text written by Entissar, which leads you through the garden. 

As Entissar was unable to obtain a visa to the UAE to perform her work, we invited a friend of hers and fellow Sweida native, Najah Mhana, to perform and together they adapted the text. During the fair, the performances were incredibly moving as the audience so closely identified with the story. So, where I’d seen it as seeing the city through someone else’s experience, which was so different to mine and asked me to think about my understanding of it through it, they saw it as their own experience. 

RP: The significance of the cultural and commercial appear central to your ongoing research, can you explain a little more about that?

RL: My interest is in how art happens and the future of art history – what will be remembered – and how we work across the arts ecosystem that includes the market, not-for-profit spaces and collecting museums. Performance, for example, is of great interest to me because it is an increasingly important part of so many artists’ practice alongside much broader constellations of mediums, from painting to ceramics to film, drawing and installation. One artist may use all of these mediums to express ideas over time.  What we see though is that some elements of practice – the material – get bought and collected while others don’t and only appear in temporary programmes. My work centres around thinking through how all elements might be incorporated into that, so that in the future we understand these practices holistically.

RP: What are you working on now?

RL: In 2020, I produced the first edition of a programme called Performance Exchange, a new dispersed platform for performance art in commercial galleries. Hosted in venues across London over a single weekend in July 2021 each participating gallery presented a performance from an artist they represent and three museums in the UK are working toward acquiring works from the programme. I’m currently working on two new editions for 2022 – a second in London and one internationally, while also trying to finish my PhD.

Simon Njami

Rajesh Punj: You talked in the press briefing about Jazz and particularly that of Miles Davies as the underpinning of your approach. Can you elaborate on that? How does music relate to the visual experience in this instance?

Simon Njami: Music is rhythm. A visual experience as well. Above all, jazz is about improvisation. The experience of an exhibition should never be predetermined. It has to be a game of questions and answers.

RP: You referenced a spontaneous approach, is that something common in all of your choice of artists?

SN: No. If we go back to Miles Davis, when recording Kind of Blue, he had an idea and selected the musicians that would be the best to perform it. But of course, it also may happen that the artist gives me the intuition for a project.

RP: Regarding your choice of galleries, ‘Afriart Gallery’ and ‘Galerie MAM’, are African, whilst ‘Primo Marella Gallery’ and ‘Sabrina Amrani’ are European; was your choice artist-led?

SN: Yes. In that matter, my choices are always artist-led. They are the ones who have to perform the idea. I cannot let the choice go to the galleries. In the case of Abu Dhabi Art, the galleries had to represent an artist of African origin. I also wanted to show that African artists are not only represented in Africa and by Africans.

RP: There appears to be a remarkable spirit about everything you introduce to the fair, how do you think that translates to the Middle East, to take something from one location and relocate it to another? 

SN: I think there are a lot of similarities even if they might not know it. I think the African continent is a little more advanced in certain questions that are becoming critical in the Middle East: identity, representation, visibility, articulation of a contemporary discourse that would be glocal (to use Omi Bhaba) and not global or solely local…African artists have been working on these issues since the 60’s and the Independencies.

RP: What are you working on now?

SN: A biennale, a couple of shows, books and masterclasses, not only related to Africa.

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