The Pavilion Downtown Dubai, in collaboration with Athr Gallery, presents a mixed media exhibition by Sami Al-Turki in Gallery 2. Seeking to capture Dubai and its journey for growth through a split channel video and a series of large-scale photographs, Al-Turki’s detailed subjects allude to a much larger personification of the city and its expanding nature. With an acute, almost blunt hyperrealism, Sami Al-Turki’s series, Constructakons, presents heroic images of construction vehicles, tractors and cranes in situ. He describes such machines as “the soldiers that built this city,” yet in his work, these hulking machines stand frozen, as though they have been stopped in their tracks immobile. This overbearing stillness suspends time, and in doing so, conveys a sense of intimacy, as if the air between the viewer and the subject has suddenly become uncomfortably silent, too close. To see these machines motionless is surreally hypnotic. It is an unnatural moment, as it is through their excavating, moving and lifting that the global city has emerged. Al-Turki’s portrayal of these nameless ‘soldiers’ as glorified individuals at various stages of rest, creates a feeling of disquiet in an otherwise bustling urban jungle.
The Washaeg series hints at a world with an apocalyptic vision for global culture. Al Turki’s lens captures a void, which had once been adorned with majestic structures, but is now spotted with fortified walls encircling nothingness.
Traffic presents The Graduates, a group show by recent graduates of the Fine Arts program at University of Sharjah, curated by artist, curator and professor, Isak Berbic. This group show features four artists, Sarah Abu Abdallah (Saudi Arabia), Hala Ali (Saudi Arabia), Sofia Byttebier (Argentina) and Nada Dada (United Arab Emirates), who use painting, video and installation as their principle mediums in examining issues of contemporary society. The exhibition aims to premiere these four emerging artists and individuals with distinct voices to the art community at large. The Graduates offers an insight into some of the contemporary art that is developing among young artists in the UAE today. These artists will now embark on a career as fine arts practitioners shaping the future cultural landscape of our region.
In this solo show, Walid Siti exhibits a corpus of drawings and small-format sculptures that continue the theme of his current project at the “Wounded Water” exhibition in this year’s Pavilion of Iraq at the 54th Venice Biennale. Kurdistan’s powerful landscape is a recurrent theme in Siti’s work, reflecting the influence it has on the everyday life of the region’s inhabitants. Here, he focuses on the plight of the Great Zab River (“Zei” in Kurdish), which is one of the major tributaries of the Tigris. In elegant, muted colors and throbbing brush strokes, Siti shows how the romantic image of the river as a fundamental source of life raises questions about the impact of climate change, population growth, rapid development and repeated political tug-of-war in the region.
On July 15, Ayyam Auctions will proudly present its ninth auction, the 2011 session of the Beirut Sale. Held annually at Ayyam Gallery’s Beirut outpost, this forthcoming public auction will showcase a robust selection of contemporary art from the Middle East. With over 60 lots by artists from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, this highly anticipated event has been significantly expanded from previous years, and will feature painting, sculpture, photography and limited edition prints. Among the regional art world superstars that will be represented in this edition are Cairo-born Armenian artist Chant Avedissian, Syrian painter Safwan Dahoul and Palestinian painter Samia Halaby. A carefully curated focus on the Beirut art scene over the past 50 years spotlights the equally important contributions of prominent Lebanese figures such as multidisciplinary artist Nadim Karam and painters Paul Guiragossian and Mohammad El Rawas.
The 2011 edition of MENASART-FAIR will allow collectors, art lovers and visitors from all around the world to meet in order to discover the most apt artists in the ME.NA.SA region. MENASART-FAIR 2011 offers a very rich program of conferences, debates and round tables, organized by the world’s leading specialists in the ME.NA.SA art, thereby strengthening the legitimacy of Beirut as an international cultural capital. Parties and meetings among these various personalities will enrich the exchanges in this festive atmosphere dear to the Lebanese people.Saudi’s very own, ATHR Gallery will be present at booth 30, while Nabatt - A Sense of Being is an exhibition of contemporary art from Saudi Arabia. It features works involving visual arts, music and literature — each of them being a catalyst speeding up the creative movement among Saudi artists. The diversity of media creates an intriguing crossover illustrating the vivid cultural engagement within the Saudi art scene. The artists focalize their work on the issue of globalization — a word that describes the continuous reciprocal reshaping that the local and the global wield on one another, which has become a central issue of art and culture in the 21st century.NABATT at MENASART-FAIR is organized by Cube Arts and is curated by Reem Al-Faisal and Lulwah Al-Homoud. The exhibition that was first curated in Shanghai by Lulwah Al-Homoud and JW Stella was hosted by Duolun Museum of Modern Art and was the main cultural event for the Saudi Arabian Pavilion at the World Expo, Shanghai, 2010.
