Deccan Herald, India
April 30 2005

Oasis of art in desert land

Gulf countries were synonymous with earning pots of money. These
days, the sleepy little Emirate of Sharjah is determinedly pushing
art of the real kind, says Gunvanthi Balaram.

The seventh edition of the Sharjah Biennial has been up and running
since April 6, lending a ripple of excitement to this placid place.
The sprawling two-month international exhibition of contemporary art
and its add-on activities-workshops and seminars-are spread over two
architecturally contrasting spaces.

One is the Sharjah Art Museum, whose galleries are reminiscent of a
minimalist sort, and the Sharjah Expo Centre is a hangar-sized shed
with temporary walls to create galleries in the vast white space.

The biennial is aimed at developing Sharjah as a cultural hub in the
Gulf’s otherwise soulless commercial landscape. In 1998, UNESCO named
Sharjah the Gulf’s `cultural capital.’

Heritage initiatives

The biennial is one of the arts and heritage initiatives being
vigorously promoted by its ruler: Sheikh bin Mohammed al-Qasimi to
strengthen that reputation. His daughter, Sheikha Hoor, who was an
art student in London, heads the show.

Its inaugural was a buzzing affair- with the Sheikh opening the show,
attended by most of the 74 artists from 36 countries. Also present
were a group of top foreign art historians and curators (including
Okwui Enwezor of the last trail-blazing Documentary in Kassel,
Germany).

If, in the opening week, the show attracted more members of the
international media and art cognoscenti than of the local community,
the fault certainly does not lie with the art on display. This
biennial is as absorbing as it is unexpected. Curated by the heroic
Jack Persekian, the founder-director of the Al- Mamal Foundation for
Contemporary Art in Jerusalem, and assisted by Ken Lum and Tirdad
Zolghadr, the exhibition focused on the theme of `Belonging’ -a theme
that sparks instant empathy.

It’s a theme that all three curators have long been grappling with.
Persekian, 42, a Palestinian of Armenian descent, runs the only
gallery of Palestinian art in East Jerusalem. While periodically
curating abroad (his show -Disorientation-held at the House of World
Cultures in Berlin two years ago, won wider appreciation), Persekian
has dealt with the matter of dislocation and identity all his life.

Lum is a Vancouver-based artist of Chinese descent, who has dealt
with art fraught with politics. Tirdad Zolghadr is a Zurich-based
Iranian writer-curator with a keen interest in how ethnicity is spun
in globalisation. Naturally, they’ve interpreted the theme with
profound gentleness and generosity.

`Where are you from? That’s the first question I’m asked when I
travel. And often I like to say I live somewhere between my Armenian
origins and my Arab identity,’ says Persekian.

`My personal concern and investment in this show stems from my
identity, coming from Palestine, a place ravaged by violence. There’s
also the Armenian descent, holding an American passport and my
encounter with this place. There are so many foreigners living here,
the antithesis of where I’m from’.

Ken Lum observes, `There’s a glaring contrast between the desert and
the concentration of high-rises along -and increasingly on- the sea,
not to mention the proliferation of artificial and exclusive
settlements devoid of any reference to local heritage. Then, unlike
its flamboyant neighbour, Dubai, which bumps with drinks, nightlife
and hep women, Sharjah is policed by stringent decency laws
prohibiting bars, co-educational schools, even late-night Internet
cafes and `sexy’ clothes’.

Material and context

This reality, he and Persekian point out, also provides the material
and context for many of the artists taking part. The result is a show
with a great deal of self and socially conscious art, much of it
projected in video images. Like it or not, video is the
state-of-the-art today. Some of the works pack a punch, but fall
short of being explosive.

Photography also makes a strong showing, but there are hardly any
paintings and drawings, making Karin Jannsen’s muted, intriguing
1930s-style set of paintings leap out. Sculptures and object-based
installations are also rare.

Therefore, the `Sharjah Birdcage’ and Olaf Nicolai’s `masses of
washing’ (bought from a village near Naples) that hang between the
museum’s exterior walls, are more powerful in their visual and
spatial punch.

Palestinian-in-exile Suha Shoman’s twin-screen video installation of
the artist walking in the now misty, now clear pebbled hills of Petra
is another highlight. From the mount she can see the `horizons of a
homeland I have never been in’.

Tracy Moffat’s vivid-hued series of comic-strip-like photographs
redolent of the Australian aborigine’s physical and emotional
landscape; Tarek al-Ghoussein’s stark views of Sharjah’s construction
sites, printed on rice paper and conjuring a link with images of
Israel’s barrier wall in Palestine; Mohammed Kazem’s `Window’ that
opens onto the foreigner’s sweat and blood on which the Emirates is
developed, are also the highlights of the event.

And not least, there”s Moataz Nasr’s gripping and award-winning
video work, `The Echo.’ The installation is structured like a
dialogue between two screens, one projecting a classic scene from
Youssef Chahine’s film `Al-Ard’ (The Earth), the other showing a
re-enactment of the same scene by Egyptian storyteller Chirine
al-Ansary in a downtown Cairo café.

Nasr shared the biennial’s $30,000 award with Maja Bajevic and Mario
Rizzi. Bajevic’s poignant set of photographs depicts Christmas lights
in a bleak Bosnian landscape, a valiant bid to dispel the gloom of
death, while Mario Rizzi’s engrossing, exuberant six-screen video:
`Out of Place (Images Deracine),’ explores the life experiences of
second generation immigrants in Paris.

Documentary nature

The documentary nature of much of the video art led some, including a
few local art students, to wonder where documentary ends and art
begins. `The distinction,’ Rizzi is quick to explain, `lies in the
editing and interpretation of the work. I may have documented the
lives of these immigrants, lived with them, interviewed them and
filmed them. But the way I chose to edit, interpret and present the
visual-verbal material turned it from a documentary into an art’.

According to Sheikha Hoor, this is precisely the idea of the
biennial- `to get the art to excite the mind of the viewer, to give
people, both nationals, domiciles and travelers, and especially
students, something to mull over, talk about and take home. `The idea
is not to preach, proselytise or provide answers but to open up a
space for conversation. After all, these are existential issues that
people are constantly confronted with’.