Current and Upcoming Exhibitions in Dubai
It’s been a tougher than normal summer in Dubai, pandemic numbers are still on the rise and the high temperatures has also not helped.
But now that we’re in September, the evenings at least are a bit more bearable. Art exhibition spaces in Dubai have opened their doors for a while, and a new season of exhibitions opens later this month. All of them are following strict Covid-19 health and safety precautions, so please follow their instructions and keep your mask on when you visit and carry a hand sanitzer, especially since you have to touch to open many entrance doors of the galleries.
Whilst there have been a plethora of online exhibitions for the past few months, none interested me personally, as it’s not how I want to see art works and if it meant not visiting an art exhibition for months, so be it.
But I’m looking forward to visiting a few of these exhibitions, some already on and more coming soon.
Current Exhibitions
Michael Rakowitz
Dates: 11 March - 22 November 2020
Location: Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai
‘Michael Rakowitz’ takes over levels 1 and 2 of Jameel Arts Centre with eight major installations made over the last two decades; this the first solo exhibition by the renowned Iraqi-American artist to take place in the Middle East and Asia.
A sculptor, detective and sometimes chef, Rakowitz is keenly attuned to the social dimensions of art practice and his work is characterised by a process of deep research. Working with architecture, artefacts and food, Rakowitz excavates personal, social and material histories and connects seemingly disparate stories across time and space. In particular, he is interested in how pop culture can be used to access shared cultural narratives.
Artist’s Rooms
Dates: 12 June 2020 - 3 January 2021
Location: Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai
Lawrence Abu Hamdan: This whole time there were no land mines
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s sound and video installation, This whole time there were no land mines (2017) documents a ‘shouting valley’ that lies in the contested area of the Golan Heights, Syria. This stretch of land was annexed by Israel from Syria following a ceasefire in 1967 and was named ‘the shouting valley’, as the area’s topography allows for an acoustic leak across the border.
Subsequently, separated families have gathered on either side of the border in order to shout across the divide to each other and remain in contact. Made from found mobile phone footage and audio recordings, the work depicts an incident that took place in 2011 when, for the first time since 1967, the border was breached, and 150 Palestinians protesters from Syria broke into Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Larissa Sansour’s film In Vitro (2019) is an Arabic-language sci-fi film, set in the biblical town of Bethlehem during the aftermath of an eco-disaster. The film presents an otherworldly reflection on memory, history, place and identity, with the locale of the film providing a narratively, politically and symbolically charged backdrop.
This is the Middle Eastern premiere of In Vitro, which was co-directed with Søren Lind and features internationally renowned actors Hiam Abbass and Maisa Abd Elhadi.
Taysir Batniji explores loss and memory in To My Brother (2012), a series of 60 inkless ‘drawings’ carved onto paper. Based on family photographs of his brother’s wedding in 1985, the work commemorates his brother’s death, which took place two years after this symbolic date, resulting from Israeli sniper fire during the First Intifada in Palestine in 1987.
Batniji’s intimate drawings, from a distance resemble blank sheets of paper, but on close inspection, reveal a personal story of family and celebration etched into the paper—dancing hand-in-hand, embracing each other, men, women and children laughing, and a newly married bride and groom posing and gathering with their guests. The meticulously traced contours of his family’s interactions evoke the pain of loss and absence—emotions that transcend beyond a locale or political discourse.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Chaffa Ghaddar: Recesses
Dates: 22 September - 25 October 2020
Location: Tashkeel, Nad Al Sheba, Dubai
Chafa Ghaddar’s solo exhibition shines a new light on the ancient mural-making technique of fresco by challenging the “wall” and the idea of completion. ‘Recesses’ is a body of work resulting from a year of research and experimentation, which combines paper, painting, fresco and other media as a territory of skin, offering viewers an intimate and challenging experience of touch, colour, texture and material.
What if frescoes lose confidence? What if appetising pigments take over? What if scale is shaken and verticality defied? What if a wall weight is suspended?
Every Soiled Page
Dates: 19 September — 19 December 2020
Venue: Ishara Art Foundation, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Praneet Soi, Olive Tree IV, 2020 Silverpoint on linen, 31.5 x 31.5 inches from the Prabhakar Collection
An exhibition of artworks that invokes our relationship to reading and remembering as collective acts of resistance. The title of the show is inspired from a verse by poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz written during his imprisonment in Montgomery Central Jail in Pakistan. The show highlights the different surfaces and materials on which memories, traces, imprints and songs reside, inviting us to think about how we spread them further.
Curated by Sabih Ahmed, the exhibition features works from the Prabhakar Collection by artists Anju Dodiya, Astha Butail, Neha Choksi, Praneet Soi and Sunil Padwal, and a newly commissioned performance-installation by Inder Salim that will expand the exhibition into a space of readings, recitals, inscriptions and annotations.
Fahd Burki: Places Between
Dates: 19 September - 7 November 2020
Location: Grey Noise, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Fahd Burki, Pencil drawing 5 2020, Coloured pencil on paper, 37.5 x 50.3 cm
Some Notes on Leaving
In the vast emptiness of the pale monochrome sky, planes carve silver lines that arch like metal rainbows in the twilight; at night they burn like neon food signs. Higher still, men float in a steel ship and take pictures and generate diagrams and graphs of the lives we live and send them back for us to marvel at.Grids, lines, boxes, sprawls, lit well or plunged in darkness, hierarchies of living – your non-belief is as good as mine. As the universe folds itself neatly around corners, there is space for everyone, including the misfits. Especially the misfits.
Hera Büyüktaşçıyan: On Stones and Palimpsests
Dates: 19 September - 7 November 2020
Location: Green Art Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
How do landscapes (both territorial and cultural) shift as carriers of cyclical time? Can we translate volatile geographies into architectures of memory? These are amongst the concerns Hera Büyüktaşcıyan delves into in her exhibition On Stones and Palimpsests, marking her second solo at the Gallery. Looking at territorial divisions and historical ruptures in different cities across time, she unravels these unstable spaces across a series of drawings, sculptures and video.
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim: Memory Drum
Dates: 19 September - 12 November 2020
Location: Lawrie Shabibi, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, 'Blue Boulevard' (2020). Courtesy the artist and Lawrie Shabibi
Memory Drum – Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim's second solo exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi. Featuring an exceptional series of recent paintings and sculptures, all created in the void since March 2020, the exhibition showcases the progression of Ibrahim’s artistic practice.
New Wave: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School Archives
Dates: 19 September - 10 October 2020
Location: Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Mohamed Melehi, Untitled, 1970-1971, cellulose paint on wood. Private collection / Courtesy artist and Zamân Books & Curating
Mohamed Melehi (b. 1936, Asilah, Morocco) is regarded as a major figure for postcolonial Moroccan art and within the history of transnational modernism and widely regarded as a major figure of postcolonial Moroccan art and of transnational modernism. Previously unseen works and archives present Melehi as a painter, photographer, muralist, graphic and urban designer, art teacher, and cultural activist.
The exhibition tells the story of the radical Casablanca Art School, retracing Melehi’s career chronologically—from the 1950s to the 1980s – as well as including some of the artist’s contemporary works.
Philip Mueller: The Last Days of the Soft Machine
Dates: 28 September - 4 November 2020
Location: Carbon 12, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Dogdays at Santo Stefano, Philip Mueller, 2020, Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, 39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in
In the summer of 2017, the notorious Black Flamingo Sad Boys emerged from dark, woodsy pastures, to abandon the confines of their Alpine environment for the bleached sand and enticing turquoise pools of former prison-island, Santo Stefano. All inhibition was relinquished, and a seemingly endless summer was birthed in the ruminations of Philip Mueller (b.1988, Austria) where the gang established a new haven in the anti-beach resort, Beach Resort Tiberio. Knowing no home nor respite, the gang saw fit to indulge their hedonistic desires at their seemingly newfound paradise - from racing 60’s, 70’s and 80’s cult car classics, to retiring to the languorous way of life the anti-beach resort implores.
As creator of his intricate universe, Philip Mueller conceives a timely conclusion to the resort series in The Last Days of Soft Machine. Enveloped in dense greenery, every corner of the island is alight. Glasses clink sharply against one another, held up high to commemorate the end of Beach Resort Tiberio, wherein Mueller’s new paintings delineate the detrimental culmination of the Black Flamingo Sad Boys’ exhaustive lifestyle of excess, in the event of one last great celebration.