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 own 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. 

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