Sifting Through the Sands at Art Dubai

Courtesy Capital D Studio
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum admires El Anatsui's "In the World But Don't Know the World?," 2009, at October Gallery's booth.

Published: March 24, 2010

Anthony Haden-Guest on Art Dubai


Courtesy Capital D Studio
Fair-goers examine Nazif Topcuogi's work at the booth of Dubai's Green Art Gallery.

DUBAI— Some years ago, when visiting Rem Koolhaas’s Rotterdam studio, I saw a rendering for his Dubai Project hanging on the wall. Conceived during the emirate's flusher days, the schema featured a chaste, domino-shaped oblong placed amid a decidedly less chaste profusion of boisterously puffed-up and exploding architectural forms. Written beneath this scene of alien interpolation was the slogan: "Among the Geniuses."
Well, the Koolhaas domino has not as yet achieved liftoff, but here I was at Art Dubai among the geniuses once again, most notably the Burj Al Arab and the Burj Khalifa, the latter of which opened on January 4 and is, at 2,717 feet, the tallest building in the world. But the recent monetary upheavals that have made Dubai an economic punching bag recently may still have a few haymakers left, so the countless cranes bristling throughout the region were motionless. It was as if a movie had stopped and the place was waiting for the director's command before lurching back into action.



But if building is one of Dubai’s strategies for achieving greater visibility and prestige on the world stage, Art Dubai is another. It had been two years since my last visit, and on my first day I trawled the stands with a question in mind: Why Dubai? Or, to be precise, why had so many of world's top-flight galleries come to a fair in a largely untested, highly volatile art market?



"I have three or four collectors in the region,” said Conor Macklin of Grosvenor Vadehra, a gallery with outposts in London and New Delhi. "I’m showing Indian art." He had four drawings by the Goa-born F.N. Souza already red-stickered, and he showed me a 1959 canvas by the Pakistani artist, Sadequain Naqqash. “I found it in Baltimore four months ago,” he said. “It came up at a very small auction house.” He had just sold it for $200,000. So that's a good rationale for Art Dubai right there.

Javier Peres of Peres Projects, which has spaces in Berlin and Los Angeles, had “a client in the region” too. “It’s not Frieze, it’s not Miami," he said. "We’ve done all the usual-suspect shows." But he liked the less blue-chip fairs. “I’ve done Rotterdam, I’ve done Athens, I’ve done Cologne,” said the dealer, whose trendy artists — from Terence Koh to Assume Vivid Astro Focus — have benefited from exposure in those emerging markets.



But why was Mihaly Suryani, the director of Budapest's Nessim Galeria, here? "To breathe the air of adventure!" Did he have collectors here? "Not yet!" he said, ebulliently.

Aidan Salakhova, who started Moscow’s first commercial art gallery back in the days of perestroika, had the simplest answer: “This is Russian Miami. They have five, six flights here a day.” I observed that I hadn’t heard much Russian spoken in the aisles. "On the beach, only Russian language,” she replied.

Yes, this wondrously glitzy petropolis has a white sand beach with umbrellas, sailboats, watersports, and palms with pineapply trunks. One of the slogans the Situationists painted on Paris walls in 1968 was Sous le pave, le plage! "Underneath the paving stones, the beach." Here it’s beneath the marble.



On day two, I and others in the art-press posse went to Sharjah, a neighboring emirate that had had its own art biennial the year before, for a visit to Sultan Bin Saud Al Qasimi’s private museum. The collection, as you might expect in a culture not yet policed by consultants, was eclectic. Standouts included work by a Syrian painter, Saban Adam, and In A Strange Place, a 2009 video that Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman shot of himself walking blindfolded and barefoot through a desert.

There were also a couple photographs by Manal Al Dowayan, a female Saudi artist who was said to be leaving her job at the Aramco oil company to become a full-time photographer. In each image, Saudi women wearing deeply saturated black are pictured against the chainlink fencing of the Aramco compound. Power cables gouge the sky. Al Qasimi explained that when Al Dowayan had made figurative drawings as a young girl, she had been required to cancel them with lines. “So they cannot be idolized,” he said.



I was scribbling in a notebook as I walked out. A fellow hack said “I wouldn’t do that.” In a comic strip, I would have radiated question marks. “They might think you are one of the Dubai 11,” he said.
The Dubai 11 were the Mossad team who had assassinated a Hamas leader in the emirate on January 20. Ineptly landing themselves on security cameras in the process — wearing disguises: false beards, the works — they escaped across the border under stolen identities. The journalist had been joking, but the joke reflected the distinguishing characteristic of the fair: where it happened to be.

Contemporary art fairs tend to have an identikit aspect, the Big Four most unmistakably. We talk about the “globalism” of the new art world and, yes, it has grown bigger in every way, as the technology of communications – ARTINFO very much included – makes mountains of data available 24/7. And, yes, über-artists are global in the same sense as soccer-players and conductors, being wandering stars who transcend geography.



And Art Dubai? The emirate's art program was launched in 1993, and the fair debuted three years ago to widespread international interest. But the mega-galleries, the poohbahs of the global art game, mostly moved on after sniffing the air there. I saw no Damien Hirsts on the stands, no Richard Princes, no Murakamis. (Gagosian and White Cube opted to show at the plusher Abu Dhabi Art Fair in November instead.) There was just one Warhol, a truck print at Paris gallery Chantal Crousel's booth. Art Dubai is a regional fair, and it is all the more interesting for that.



Situated in an emerging market that is still coming to grips with contemporary Western art, it is also often compared to Hong Kong's ART HK, which is coming around again this spring. “Collectors are learning how to buy art," Wendy Norris of San Francisco's Frey Norris gallery said of the fair. "We did the Hong Kong festival in May. There are a lot of similarities. Hong Kong is more mature, but they are both hubs,”



“Hong Kong knows who they are," Bahar Behbahani, a New York-based Iranian painter, said by way of comparison. "They are confident. The specificity of Hong Kong is about the market, while the specificity of Dubai is about forging the Arab identity.” Why this huge emphasis on art, though? “They think it will help them keep middle-or-the-road and free from Islamic fundamentalism," she said. "There’s a backlash against the boom now. It’s less flashy, more Arab."



That evening I was talking with the Iranian artist Fereydoun Ave at a haute, Miami-style party thrown by a collector in a house on the beach at Palm Jumeirah. How had he found the fair? "It is not a matter of is it good or is it bad?” he said. "It is essential. It has to be. And this is the only place." Why did Dubai attach so much significance to the event? "It is the duty of a government to support the avant garde," said Ave. It is worth noting that the region has little history of such duty being honored over the years.

The following day there was a lunch at the Dubai World Trade Center. We entered a huge room hung with black drapes and containing muslin-curtained chambers, each lit from within at their far end. Music began throbbing from one with a lime-green hue. I peered through the muslin: a string quartet could be dimly seen, pumping away. In a lilac-colored chamber a ballerina pirouetted in a tutu. The third chamber, also lilac, seemed inert, however. I let my eyes adjust to the light. A painter was painting at an easel.

In a second room, there were lunch settings for 500, with a sign letting us know our host was the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority. Another painter worked at his easel, flanked by groups of sensuous dancers. In a ceremony, the crown prince — dressed in a golden thaub, the robe worn by males in the Gulf — handed out dagger–shaped prizes in recognition of cultural achievement. I was intrigued to find Goldman Sachs among the honorees. They haven’t been picking up too many awards recently.



No art fair is complete without an alternative fair, and Art Dubai’s is Bastakiya, in which gallerists set up projects in a small house in the oldest part of the city. I was intrigued by the work of Nadine Kanso, a Lebanese artist whose photographs of a building's scarred interior bring up memories of war-torn Beirut, and whose collages fuse fragments of her own photographs and memorabilia into the slender triumphalist shape of the Burj Khalifa. "These are my relations with the city," she said of her works. "People say there is no social fabric in Dubai. They are wrong!” Dangling from a necklace of her own design was an inscription reading "BEIRUT IS ON FIRE." Both meanings are intended.


Izadi’s work deals with history, but codes it into art. Agitprop is absent and, as such, it seems in line with what Antonia Carver of Bidoun — a cultural magazine based on New York's Lower East Side, and the curatorial partner of Art Dubai — calls "a new formalism." Among the installation pieces Bidoun brought to the fair were a "no photographs" sign, a clicking timer, and two red hazard vests — the latter two of which at first bring suicide bombers to mind, but have a wealth of other allusions as well.
Humor is often the chosen weapon. In his Fair Skies ® Corporation project, artist Mahmoud Obaidi displayed a video in which a number of blond manikins march undisturbed past a crew of racial profilers, while a dark-haired one is hauled in; the piece also involved a complicated kit for achieving blondness. A quartet of Gulf Arabs in snowy thaubs beamed a the sharp satire. “I am racially profiled every time I go to the airport,” G.H. Rabbath, who presided over the installation, told me. “I am getting really tired of it.”

But the political ice must be tread delicately here. Ramin Haerizadeh, an Iranian artist, had an image on the back page of The Daily Canvas, an art newspaper serving the fair, which included the likeness of the Empress of Iran. This was swiftly papered over. “They did not wish to offend the Iranian ambassador,” I was told. But that issue, uncensored, was soon everywhere again.

Ramin and his brother Rokni, both artists possessed of a fine wildness, have lived in Dubai since it was made clear that they were unwelcome in their home country. They were at the fair, along with Turkish photographer Nazif Topcuoglu, the celebrated Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, and a truly surprising number of other curiosity-seeking artists from the region and beyond. But then Art Dubai is something different – not better, just different – from your average art bazaar.

Oh, yes... Americans were there, too. Along with Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock and Dennis Oppenheim were there to represent the intrepid 1970s contingent. Aycock — who had her 1971 piece Sand/Fans reconstituted on site with sand from the Gulf — and Oppenheim talked me through a selection of their works in which art gulped down architecture, rather than the other way around. We had a nightcap on the flight-deck of a bar in the Burj Al Arad. An hour later I was at the airport, leaving behind a country in flux and a cultural moment that seems directed everywhere but the past.