By Sarah-Neel Smith
OFFICE, Oases (2012–13), installation view at the 2013 Sharjah Biennial
On day one of the Global Art Forum – a yearly talks programme organized in conjunction with the Art Dubai fair, now in its seventh year – economist Tarik Yousef gave a frant. For the uninitiated, that’s short for ‘friendly rant’, just one of many neologisms, puns and acronyms that were proposed during the GAF, which was organized around the capacious idea of ‘definitionism’ under the title ‘It Means This’. This year, the programme was split between Mathaf, the Museum of Modern Arab Art in Doha, and Dubai, where it coincided with the art fair at the hotel-conference-centre-souk complex Madinat Jumeirah. Some 40 artists, writers, curators and academics participated in the six-day event, which also included five artist commissions (two ‘advert adverts’ and a soundtrack), a couple of small books and a fellows programme, all spearheaded by commissioner Shumon Basar and director H.G. Masters.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Douglas Coupland, Michael Stipe and Shumon Basar at the Global Art Forum, Dubai
The frants brought speakers to the stage ahead of their main appearance, each functioning as a sort of screen test, a short teaser that stimulated audience investment in the character-based dramas to unfold on stage minutes later. Some were seat-of-the-pants operations with a low-tech vibe; others were orchestrated performances, timed like clockwork for the 15-minute window. The controlled anarchy of the format accommodated both playful impulses and some serious political flag-planting, establishing a regular swing between the ludic and the long-faced that characterized the GAF as a whole. (The fact that Yousef’s presentation on economic free zones took place between two kitschy potted palms, a nod to American comedian Zach Galifianakis’ online talk-show Between Two Ferns, gives a sense of the dynamic.)
Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Uzma Z. Rizvi and Payam Sharifi (Slavs & Tatars) at the Global Art Forum, Dubai
Sometimes, that very playfulness did the important work of easing tensions and smoothing interactions. This was the case for the term ‘MENA’, which, as part of GAF’s ongoing exercise in ‘definitionism’, Masters and Basar proposed as a means to describe a psychological state (Middle Eastern Nervous Anxiety) rather than the more familiar geographic notation (Middle East/North Africa). MENA quickly became shorthand amongst conference participants, providing a new angle on familiar topics and an accommodation for nervousness or irresolution that may not have otherwise been given room – as well as occasion for laughter and release when a talk became tense. At other times, though, the term seemed to function like a get-out-of-jail-free card: one could simply cite MENA and flee from the heavier topics at hand. When does playfulness become facetious or even unethical; when is self-seriousness a handicap? And what are the stakes of these approaches at a conference in the Gulf, as the question of how to produce knowledge within the region is driven ahead by the museums, universities and educational centres busily being established nearby? Itself another nascent knowledge-producing organization, the GAF didn’t hand down a judgment one way or the other, but it did provide a spacious forum in which to begin thinking about these issues.
SANAA, Bubble (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial
All of this is part and parcel of a rapidly changing local cultural landscape, where, as of March 2013, the Sharjah Biennial is over a decade old, the Qatar Museums Authority’s Mathaf is still fighting to come into its own as a Museum of Modern Arab Art, the Art Dubai fair continues to expand yearly, and the state of construction of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island remains unresolved. In the meantime, Saadiyat Island hosts a museum devoted to its future museums – if that doesn’t sum up the region’s vertigo-inducing relation to historical time, I don’t know what does.
Shimabuku, Shimabuku’s Boat Trip (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial
Distributed across multiple sites, including the Sharjah Art Foundation’s gorgeous new art spaces, a former bank building, a calligraphy museum and the Sharjah Art Museum, the 11th Sharjah Biennial ‘Re:Emerge—Towards a New Cultural Cartography’ features more than 100 artists. Coming after Jack Persekian’s controversial iteration of last year, curator Yuko Hasegawa, perhaps inevitably, seemed to have been tasked with playing it safe. The result was a strange disjuncture between her stated curatorial coordinates and the unacknowledged curatorial statements that asserted themselves in the form of the exhibition itself. (In a throwback to biennial ambitions of the 1990s, the curatorial framework included Islamic courtyards, Ibn Battuta’s 14th-century travel notes, hopes that dialogue between Sharjah’s migrant populations might take place within commissioned architectural ‘oases’, as well as evocations of the Global South.) Ironically, Hasegawa was most silent on the issue of sound. Not only was this an explicit concern in nearly half of the exhibited art works and performances, this unspoken theme arguably served as one of the more effective entry-points into the curator’s stated ideas, retaining a political edge or level of regional engagement that she directed us to elsewhere.
SUPERFLEX with Schul Landscape Architects, The Bank (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial
Just an hour’s flight away, in nearby Doha, Mathaf – an institution in search of both a director and a curator – is engaged in its own coming-of-age. Since opening in late 2010, the museum has featured several exhibitions by the freelance curatorial duo Art Reoriented (Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath), including the ongoing ‘Tea with Nefertiti’. The exhibition centres around the iconic 14th-century BC bust of Nefertiti, discovered in Egypt in 1912 (not included in the show but on permanent display in Berlin). Tracing the 100-year biography of the masterpiece, it addresses the broader phenomenon of ‘appropriation, de-contextualisation, and re-semanticisation’ of ancient Egyptian culture in both Egypt and the West from the early 20th century onwards.
J&K, Horus and Anubis in Islamic Cairo (2006), pigment print
on paper, included in ‘Tea with Nefertiti’, Mathaf, Doha
Mathaf’s current conundrum – reliant on mercenary curators, at the cost of a more settled structure of accountability, sustainability and growth that comes with the presence of a permanent staff – might serve as a cautionary example for those involved in the region’s cultural sector. Nevertheless, Mathaf continues to provide a forum for art works and research materials that are difficult to access elsewhere. I, for one, was grateful for the substantial archival research, and intrigued by some of the artistic pairings, like Lee Miller’s Egyptian photos of the 1930s alongside those of Mamduh Muahmad Fathallah and Van Leo from the ’40s. Scheduled to travel to Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe in this month (under the more cerebral Francophone title ‘Le Théorème de Nefertiti’), the exhibition is billed by organizers as the first contemporary art exhibition to originate in the Gulf and travel to the West. Whether this is even possible to confirm, and they’re winning in the game of firsts or not, Bardaouil and Fellrath’s assertion raises the important point that an institution like Mathaf may have a stronger impulse and more significant resources to invest in research on such topics, than many Western institutions do.