THE FORMULA

The National
April 3 2009
UAE

Jack Peresekian, the Sharjah Biennial’s artistic director. "We are
talking the biennial," he says, "beyond an event." Tina Chang /
The National

Sceptics insist the Gulf’s new mega-museums will merely ‘import
culture’ from abroad. But at this year’s Sharjah Biennial, Kaelen
Wilson-Goldiefinds a vibrant laboratory for making art rooted in the
region’s past, present and future.

The golf course at the Hyatt Regency Dubai is lit up like a 1970s
mafia wedding; 24 strands of round, retro light bulbs cascade over the
green below like ribbons on an electrified maypole. The artist Khalil
Rabah, who directs the Riwaq Biennial in Ramallah, is dancing in his
sunglasses despite the darkness of the night. Around him gyrates a
throng of artists, curators, friends and colleagues, most of whom
are, at this point, barefoot. Rasha Salti, a curator from Beirut, is
looping graceful semi-circles around the lawn. Tarek Abou el Fetouh,
a curator from Cairo, is waving a scarf above his head and doing what
can only be described as a disco dabkeh.

It’s later than late, and the Sharjah Biennial after-party, thrown
by the magazine Bidoun and Dubai’s Third Line gallery, was scheduled
to end more than an hour ago. Despite the fact that everyone here is
exhausted – the past five days have seen the openings of the Bastakiya
Art Fair, Art Dubai and the ninth edition of the Sharjah Biennial, as
well as a punishing schedule of irreconcilable events for the March
Meeting in Sharjah, the Art Park and Global Art Forum in Dubai and
the morning art school lecture series in Bastakiya – no one seems
in any way inclined to call it a night. Finally, Sunny Rahbar, one
of the founders and directors of The Third Line, cuts the music and
takes the mic.

After firmly announcing last call, she tells a little story about the
venue. The Hyatt Regency is more than 25 years old: by local standards,
it is a relic. Rahbar grew up in the UAE, and in her characteristically
breathy voice, she tells the crowd about how she used to go ice-skating
here, at the hotel’s Galleria Ice Rink, when she was a kid. (A week
later, The Third Line’s Tarané Ali Khan, who was born in Sharjah,
tells me she did the same. "Probably everyone who grew up here
remembers going ice-skating there. Those were good times.")

Rahbar is one in a crucial generation of cultural figures who have
literally and figuratively come of age in the UAE. They include Lisa
Farjam, the founder and editor-in-chief of Bidoun; Murtaza Vali, a
writer and art historian who describes Sharjah as evocatively as Luc
Sante describes New York; Shehab Hamad, who seven years ago helped
to establish the Dubai-based multimedia collective 9714 and likewise
captures the city in colourful metaphors; Rami Farook, the owner
of the design gallery Traffic; and Lamya Gargash, an artist whose
gorgeous photographs of haunting Emirati interiors will represent
the UAE in its first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale
in June. In many ways, these people are the core around which the
local art scene coheres.

They are joined by medium- to long-term residents of the UAE, such as
Tarek al Ghoussein, an artist who teaches at the American University of
Sharjah and counts Gargash among his former students; Claudia Cellini,
Rahbar’s partner in The Third Line; Antonia Carver, who heads up
Bidoun’s special projects unit, and Jack Persekian, the brain behind
the Sharjah Biennial for three editions and counting. From there,
the circle extends out to include those who have contributed their
time and talent to cultivating and theorising cultural production in
the UAE, including Tirdad Zolghadr, who co-organised the 2005 Sharjah
Biennial and is now the curator of the UAE’s Venice pavilion, and
Shumon Basar, a writer, editor and curator who last year published
a book on urban tabula rasa called Cities from Zero and is currently
at work on a novel about Dubai.

The collective work of this generation, which is more or less the age
of the UAE itself, gives the place depth and imagination, and more
trenchantly, a past and a future, both of which are usually absent
from the standard-issue stories on art in the Gulf. Nothing exemplifies
this better than the work of Lamya Gargash: her Presence series, which
was exhibited a year ago in the labyrinthine Bastakiya district, is
a catalogue of derelict domestic spaces in Sharjah, Dubai and Ajman,
each image capturing a room either abandoned or soon to be so.

Her approach may be directly informed by the work of Bernd and
Hilla Becher, who documented industrial structures on the verge
of obsolescence. But Gargash’s images also do something completely
different: they register the past in a place that is presumed not
to have one. They capture a world of intimate ruin, one that both
beautifully and painfully contradicts the overbearing image of
flash, futuristic Dubai. The dated decor, the discarded belongings,
the remnants of family rituals and workday routines, all of these
things mark the passage of time. In Presence and two other series of
photographs – Majlis (currently on view in Sharjah) and Familial (an
exploration of one-star hotels in the UAE that the artist is producing
for Venice) – Gargash’s strange, cluttered or emptied spaces hint at
anonymous narratives, lived experiences and alternative histories.

Gargash’s images are emblematic of the ways in which the real energy
of the Emirati art scene is currently being generated from within –
not by the fabulousness of art world celebs who occasionally parachute
in, nor from the boundless ambitions of architectural plans that won’t
be realised for years, but rather by the serious and surprisingly
poignant work that is quietly being done on the ground.

****************** Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial, which coincided
for the first time this year, have distinctly different identities:
Art Dubai, established in 2007 as the Gulf Art Fair, is the art-world
equivalent of a trade expo, where the real business is the buying
and selling of product, and everything else is window-dressing. The
Sharjah Biennial, founded in 1993, is a resolutely non-commercial
endeavour, committed to the exhibition of artworks without regard for
their market value. The success of Art Dubai ultimately depends on the
sales made during (and after) the event. Success for the biennial is
more difficult to gauge, though the implications are potentially much
greater – establishing foundations for the making and exhibiting of art
in a country whose future plans for art institutions play an outsize
role. Shumon Basar, writing in the magazine Blueprint after the last
edition, credited the biennial for "its genuine attention to art as
discourse – and not as theme park lookalike or celebrity flytrap. In
a place where alternative social or political outlooks are difficult
to find (or create), the Sharjah Biennial is an opportunity to smuggle
in – under the aegis of art – unstable, contentious thinking."

Scheduling the two events side-by-side made for some obvious
atmospheric contrasts, but it also created a fine social swirl. There
were plenty of art-world aristocrats: Glenn Lowry, the director of
the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s chief
curator Richard Flood, the Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, Daniel
Birnbaum of the Venice Biennale and the ubiquitous Hans Ulrich Obrist,
of the Serpentine Gallery. There were super-collectors, power dealers
and armies of staffers from major arts institutions whose business
cards alone raised hopeful eyebrows. And there were significantly
more artists – and independent curators, and academic researchers,
and directors of small little-engines-that-could art spaces – than
would have been the case at the fair alone. Both Art Dubai and the
Sharjah Biennial substantially bolstered their parallel programmes
this year, such that everyone without an assistant was tearing back
and forth between the two cities, clutching tattered schedules in
hand, trying to make it to all the lectures, debates, presentations,
artists’ talks, performances, concerts, video screenings and parties.

The first event this year was the opening of the Bastakiya Art Fair,
a rusticated fringe event that lends edge and a certain architectural
authenticity to the glitz and glamour of Art Dubai, celebrating an
ethic of openness against the steep hierarchies of access that continue
to characterise the more mainstream fair. The opening had the feel
of an eclectic class reunion. This was primarily due to the second
iteration of the March Meeting, an initiative that Jack Persekian
launched last year to nurture collaboration and the exchange of ideas
among arts organisations in the Middle East. The list of participants
in this year’s March Meeting was a veritable who’s who of culture
brokers in the region, however elastically it may be defined.

To bring all of these people together was to materialise a network that
has been in place for nearly a decade. And in that sense it really
was a reunion, gathering in one place the entire cast of characters
who have helped to build the independent art scenes in cities such
as Tangier (Yto Barrada of the Cinémathèque de Tanger), Cairo
(William Wells of the Townhouse Gallery), Beirut (Christine Tohme of
Ashkal Alwan, Lamia Joreige of the Beirut Art Center, Rasha Salti of
Arte East, Zeina Arida of the Arab Image Foundation) and Amman (Suha
Shoman and Ala’ Younis of Darat al Funun). These organisations –
hyper-flexible and adaptive – may be unseen or illegible to anyone
looking for the kind of cultural infrastructures that have been
established in cities such as London or New York, or anticipating the
massive museum projects being planned for Abu Dhabi or Doha. But they
are of critical importance in terms of creating alternative models
for the production and presentation of new work, pushing contemporary
art into new areas of experimentation and innovation, and supporting
artists and audiences alike.

****************** Still, to speak of the contemporary art scene in
the Middle East as if it were one, or as if the region itself were
a monolith, has become increasingly problematic and untenable of
late, particularly as outside interest in the field has so markedly
increased, and even more so in the UAE, where it is possible to
imagine more complex exchanges among artists of Arab, Iranian,
African and South Asian origin. Some, such as Christine Tohme, prefer
to speak of contemporary art itself as the territory, the terrain,
in which one lives and works. Others prefer to map out the art scene
as a constellation of cities rather than nation states, or as a dense
tissue in which many different cultural nodes are lodged.

But the standard line on arts projects in the Gulf – repeated in
countless stories that have been published and broadcast in the
last five years – is that culture is being imported from elsewhere
or starting from scratch. Always, these stories assert that a hundred
years ago, the cities of the Gulf were mere villages, sleepy hamlets or
quiet ports. Always, the implication is that these are blank slates,
drained of a history and devoid of a past, on which fantasies of a
dreamtime future are being projected. But this particular narrative
is as much an artificial construction as any urban skyline.

The UAE does not have the tumultuous history of Beirut, Cairo, Tehran,
Mumbai, Lahore or Dhaka – but it does have a history, and with it
material and experience, aesthetic sensibilities, architectural
typologies and myriad frictions of a political, social, and economic
nature. In other words, it has an assortment of creative sparks. It
also functions as a site of intersecting trade routes, and in terms
of contemporary art, as a gathering point for dramatically divergent
points of view. True, several enormous art projects are slowly coming
into being in the Gulf – new museums and cultural authorities being
established in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha, for example – but too often
the conversation concentrates on what will be instead of what is and
what has been.

"These cities are new," says Shehab Hamad, who was born and raised in
Dubai. "So the blank slate idea captures a certain truth. Dubai and
the Gulf have been a blank slate. It’s time to start wearing that
term as a badge of honour. But Dubai’s role in all of this is what
it has always been. A trading port. A hub. An exchange. The explosion
of commercial art spaces couldn’t have happened anywhere else in the
region. But Dubai couldn’t have happened without the less-commercial
groundwork that has been put in place in Tehran, Beirut and Cairo,
or in the absence of Doha’s and Abu Dhabi’s massive macro-cultural
strategies, or, more fundamentally, had the credit and oil-price boom
not happened. Dubai is a participative city. It belongs at any given
time to those actively engaged with it."

A question frequently aired – most prominently in a discussion at
this year’s Global Arts Forum, Art Dubai’s beachside, tent-bound
think tank – is the relationship between the Gulf’s ambitious new
arts initiatives and the region’s existing network of alternative
infrastructures. Are the new mega-projects drawing on the expertise
already present elsewhere in the region? And are they learning from the
pioneering work already done by smaller organisations rooted in the
Middle East? These are important, open-ended questions whose answers
will give shape to the museums soon to rise on Saadiyat Island. But
here it is instructive to turn to the biennial experience in Sharjah,
which has brilliantly incorporated the vitality of the region and
planted it deeply on Gulf shores – and in the process, in its current
incarnation, finally come into its own.

****************** "More than 80 per cent of the works were created
for the exhibition. That’s why you see works here that you’ve never
seen before." Isabel Carlos, the Portuguese curator responsible for
Provisions for the Future, the main component of Sharjah Biennial 9,
is speaking to journalists on the first floor of the Sharjah Art
Museum. Today is the day of the press preview. Carlos assumes her
audience is international, and populated by some of those sad weathered
souls who drag themselves around the world attending a barrage of
different biennials only to end up seeing the same art everywhere.

Funding the production of a remarkably high number of new commissions
has become the Sharjah Biennial’s key point of distinction in an
over-crowded and ever-expanding field of far-flung global art events.

Before the Christie’s auctions of modern and contemporary Arab and
Iranian art in Emirates Towers, before the creation of Art Dubai,
before the announcements about the Louvre and the Guggenheim in Abu
Dhabi, Sharjah was the undisputed champion of culture in the UAE. When
Bidoun did its Emirates Now issue in 2005, Sharjah had six museums
where the rest had one or none. The ruler of Sharjah, Dr Sheikh Sultan
Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, is renowned for his commitment to the arts, and
he is said to be a playwright, too. The artist Hassan Sharif, widely
known as the godfather of the Emirati art scene and the homespun hero
of performance art, founded the Emirates Fine Art Society in Sharjah
in 1980. The Sharjah Biennial was established in 1993.

The Sharjah Art Museum opened in 1995, and it is now adjoined by the
Sharjah Contemporary Arab Art Museum (together they have terribly cute
acronyms: SAM and SCAAM). In 1998, Unesco named Sharjah the cultural
capital of the Arab world.

Four years after that, however, Dr Sheikh Sultan’s daughter, Sheikha
Hoor Al Qasimi, returned home from art school in London and sharply
criticised the traditional orientation of the Sharjah Biennial. As
the story goes, her father told her to do something about it, and
so she took over as the director of the event. The sixth edition,
organised by Sheikha Hoor and the British curator Peter Lewis in
2003, was dramatically different from the previous five. With 117
artists from all over the world, including Christo and William
Kentridge (who won the biennial’s top prize), it was notably more
critical and cutting-edge. With serious organisational glitches and
eleventh-hour censorship of political and sexual material, Sharjah
6 was far from perfect. But it marked the opening of a door that has
not been closed since.

Jack Persekian, a Palestinian curator of Armenian descent whose roots
in Jerusalem reach back for centuries and who founded the Anadiel
Gallery and the Mamal Foundation for Contemporary Art, joined the
Sharjah Biennial for its seventh edition, in 2005, after an earlier
curatorial team was dismissed. He had only six months to prepare. He
brought Tirdad Zolghadr and the artist Ken Lum on board and together
they curated a remarkably tidy biennial, ordered around the theme
of Belonging.

The exhibition opened in the Sharjah Expo Center, a structure the
size of an aeroplane hanger, with Emily Jacir’s poignant sculpture
of a circular baggage claims conveyor belt, and closed at the end of
a ramp-like corridor in the Sharjah Art Museum with Zoe Leonard’s
equally evocative installation of 42 vintage suitcases arranged in
a long line like lost luggage. Those two works enclosed the show in
a kind of echo chamber that allowed a succession of graceful, poetic
works to resonate. Accompanied by a tough-minded symposium organised by
Zolghadr, for which some of the more probing thinkers in the art world
came together to interrogate the format of the boilerplate biennial,
Sharjah 7 was the epitome of a well-made exhibition. For that edition,
the biennial also commissioned no less than 20 new works, in many
cases inviting local, regional and international artists to come and
spend time in Sharjah to research and produce their projects. At the
time, the biennial seemed on the brink of transforming itself into
a laboratory or think tank for artistic and intellectual inquiry,
offering artists the two things they crave most: funding and time.

To a certain extent, Sharjah 8 continued in this direction and
commissioned an even higher number of new works. It also made good
on a promise left unfulfilled by the previous edition, installing
numerous projects in public spaces in and around the city. But at the
same time, it suffered from serious curatorial strain. With Persekian
upgraded to artistic director, a team of curators awkwardly jammed 79
artists and artists’ collectives into an event entitled Still Life:
Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. It was informally dubbed the
"green" biennial, but not ironically enough. The event gave rise
to several specifically memorable works, including the collective
e-Xplo’s sound installation I Love to You: Workers’ Voices in the
UAE, which consisted of field recordings that sensitively documented
the precarious predicament of migrant workers in the region. But
in general, the biennial was messy and overburdened by a theme too
contradictory to contain.

After Sharjah 8, Persekian announced a major change in tack for
Sharjah 9. Instead of the usual curatorial process – devising a
theme, creating a wish-list of artists sensitive to the theme and
then selecting existing works or soliciting new works addressing the
theme – the biennial would put out an open invitation for artists
and non-artists alike to propose ideas for new projects unfettered by
any theme. At the time, Persekian said, in effect, that the biennial
had already established itself as a platform for contemporary art
in the Arab world (so it no longer needed a geographical focus),
and that after two editions in Sharjah, along with countless other
curatorial endeavours, he had also completely exhausted his contacts
(and was running the risk of putting on a biennial that recycled the
same names). It was time for something new, and time to cast a wider
net, and so the Sharjah Biennial’s production programme was born.

Some observers thought the idea was a disaster, and that it would
lead to a populist, mediocre biennial chock-a-block with boring Sunday
painters. Others thought it a revolutionary shakedown of the biennial
format that would produce an unprecedented, radically democratic
platform for contemporary art. Most assumed that it was in any case
a curatorial experiment that would be conducted without curators in
the conventional sense. In early 2008, the biennial issued the open
call and staggered four deadlines throughout the year.

Back at the press conference for the preview, where virtually no one
asks any questions after the curators have their say, Persekian
admits that the production programme was a harrowingly bumpy
ride. "At a certain point, we had to stop it because we realised the
production programme needs an entire infrastructure of its own. We
became totally overwhelmed. So now we will have a series of internal
discussions to see if the production programme can be set up to run
independently. This is not a work with a beginning or an end. It is
a work that needs to be fine-tuned. Mechanisms and systems need to
be put in place to support it."

>From a pool of about 500 submissions, the biennial selected 30, and
then added on to build the exhibition and a performance programme
from there. Provisions for the Future, curated by Carlos, features
the work of some 60 artists based in nearly as many cities, from
Boston to Bangalore, Caracas to Cairo, Dusseldorf to Dubai. Past
of the Coming Days, curated by Tarek Abou el Fetou, which ran March
16-25, included nearly 30 equally international performances, film
and video screenings, lectures, sound experiments and an elaborate
courtyard luncheon doubling as a live installation. This time around,
the biennial ditched the idea of locating itself only in the Sharjah
Expo Center and the Sharjah Art Museum and instead transformed the
arts and heritage areas – and the old Sharjah port between them –
into a kind of living, breathing exhibition space, such that the
biennial is now entirely fluid with the urban fabric of the city
itself. One project, by Maider López, consists of a football field
and a fountain for potable water, both of which are being used by area
residents; another, by a group of Mumbai-based artists and thinkers
known as CAMP, created a nightly radio broadcast from the Sharjah
port. Combined with a book on dhow trade between India, the UAE and
the semi-state entities that currently constitute Somalia, it was the
smartest, and sweetest, contemporary art project I’ve encountered in
years. It also deservedly won the biennial’s grand prize. All things
considered, this is both the strongest and the most intimate edition
of the Sharjah Biennial to date.

"We are taking the biennial beyond being an event," says
Persekian. "It’s not only an exhibition but a place, an organisation,
an entity that is part and parcel of the development of society. We
are not really concerned with the product. We are concerned with the
process. This is about making art. It’s not about the showcase.

"The beauty of the production programme is that we produce the works
but we do not own them. They belong to the artists. The whole point
of supporting artists is not to take the works back from them." And
therein lies the model – the alternative infrastructure for the
production and presentation of new work – that the Sharjah Biennial
is offering for anyone who might find it instructive. It hasn’t been
bought or borrowed from somewhere else but developed in the UAE’s own
backyard. The biennial has firmly established itself as a laboratory,
and it has also positioned itself as an incubator, a place where
contemporary art practice can be tested out and developed and, most
critically, supported without market pressure. In 2005, it looked as
though Sharjah’s laboratory would be located in a vacuum. This year,
it seems more truly knitted into the city and tied to its context. It
also seems like a valuable platform for an art scene that could use an
element of consistency in the here and now. If the production programme
becomes an independent entity, local practitioners stand to benefit
as much, and perhaps even more so, than their counterparts elsewhere
in the world. When asked about the Emirati art scene in relation to
other cities in the region, during a talk with journalists on the UAE’s
Venice pavilion, curator Tirdad Zolghadr said: "What’s different here
is that there is very little infrastructure. Artists need production
grants. They need schools. They need places to hang out." The Sharjah
Biennial, if it becomes the place, entity and organisation that Jack
Persekian wants it to be, may actually meet those needs.

****************** Like Lamya Gargash’s photographic work, the
real charm of Sharjah 9 lies in its tender treatment of time and
place. It is no accident that the titles of both the exhibition and the
performance programme engage more than ever before with the tactile
realities of living and working in Sharjah now. Like the UAE’s young
generation of cultural figures, the biennial looks to the past for
the sake of the future rather than bulldozing ahead from the false
premise of a blank slate.

The curator Tarek Abou el Fetouh’s programme for Past of the Coming
Days, for example, made excellent use of the art spaces that have
been operating in Sharjah for years and even decades. "When I came
here for the first time to start my research," he says, "I walked
around the arts area and I was super impressed by the number of
organisations. There are 20 theatre groups in the Emirates, and most
of them are in Sharjah. There are many arts and cultural practices that
already exist here. The programme wouldn’t have happened without using
as a starting point the cultural landscape that already exists here."

Adding to that is the biennial’s residency programme, which this
year hosted the sound artist Tarek Atoui. Back in 2005, the Danish
artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen was one of Sharjah’s first artists
in residence. "I lived in the city’s downtown area," he says, "and
when I walked around in the evenings, I noticed how nearly everyone
in the streets was young South Asian men. I started imagining towns
in India where only women, children and elderly people lived." At the
time, Larsen made a series of portraits on Super 8 and 16-millimetre
film. Those works anticipated a beautiful two-screen, 24-minute video
work, entitled Rendezvous, which is now on view on the ground floor of
the Serkal House in the arts area across from the Sharjah Art Museum.

After the residency, Larsen embarked on a long-term project that
involves recording video footage of immigrant workers he meets in
the UAE, and travelling to their homes, primarily in the Indian
state of Kerala, to record video footage of their wives, mothers
and children. For the presentation of the work, the two screens
are installed opposite own another, like video portraits or hi-tech
letters that symbolically reunite the families while simultaneously
making the distance that separates them palpable.

Next door to Larsen’s work, the Palestinian artist Sharif Waked is
showing one of the biennial’s most hypnotic and strangely seductive
works. Upending the phenomena of suicide bombers making video
testimonies and militant groups producing propagandistic video games,
the artist films a young man in fatigues, his elbows propped up on a
desk with a Kalashnikov before him and a generic Hamas-like flag in the
background. When he begins to speak, however, it becomes clear that
he’s not reading a statement in support of violence or a political
cause but rather the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. Rather
than hastening his own death, he is, like Shahrazhad, forestalling it,
using the art of storytelling to defy time. As the camera zooms in
on his face, the young man recites Shahrazhad’s instructions to her
sister Dunyazhad: "Then you must say: ‘Tell me, my sister, some tale
of marvel to beguile the night.’ Then I will tell you a tale, which,
if God wills, shall be the means of our deliverance." The title of
the work, appropriately enough for this and the much wider discussion
on the art scene in the UAE, is To Be Continued.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a staff writer at The Review.