Dubai Exhibitions to See, Spring 2024
Exhibition view: Sheher, Prakriti, Devi, Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (19 January–1 June 2024). Courtesy Ishara Art Foundation and the artists. Photo: Augustine Paredes/Seeing Things.
On the heels of Alserkal Art Week, exhibitions to see in and around Alserkal Avenue this spring include solo presentations by Ana Mazzei, El Anatsui, and Farah Al Qasimi, plus a major group exhibition curated by Gauri Gill.
Ana Mazzei: How to Disappear
Green Art Gallery, Unit 28, Alserkal Avenue
27 February–20 April 2024
Expect: a staged inquiry typical of the Brazilian artist who presents a fictional narrative centring a vanished ballerina.
Mazzei is well known for theatrical sculptures and installations drawing from architecture, literature, and mythology. Breaking the fourth wall, they stage fictional scenarios that prompt viewers to consider how they inhabit their bodies and space.
As Stephanie Bailey remarked in 2022: 'Mazzei doesn't create works so much as she makes stages out of them.'
How to Disappear is conceived around the narrative of a vanished ballerina. The exhibition, Mazzei's fourth with Green Art Gallery, presents a collection of bronze-cast deities—among them a praying frog, a beaked Pegasus, and an aged Centaur—alongside 50 paintings of geometric and biomorphic forms, which hint at the possibility of being born anew.
Katya Muromtseva: Over the Slopes of Speech
Nika Project Space, Unit 11, 19th Street Road
27 February–4 May 2024
Expect: monumental watercolour triptychs conceived following discussions with immigrants to the U.S. and U.A.E.
In her first U.A.E. exhibition, Katya Muromtseva debuts watercolour paintings conceived after interviews with women immigrants to the country. Their stories formed the basis for reflections on borders and home, translated into vibrant portrayals of collective overcoming.
'History is usually written by politicians or historians influenced by politics,' Muromtseva said. 'I wanted to explore how history could be written by its actors instead—the people who have experienced it first-hand—and how their stories could be told in a different way.'
Bleeding lines of ochres, lilacs, and sapphire blues compose interconnected bodies that form a pyramid across three panels in To Sarah (2023). The figures are aggrandised and beautified by the artist, herself an immigrant who left Russia at the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2014.
Watercolours from the 'Anti-monuments' series (2022–ongoing) begin from the artist's desire to explore the shared experience of emigration. Together, they celebrate the resilience and memory of women, reframing their historic significance within society.
Moataz Nasr: BOTTLE NECK
Galleria Continua, Burj Al Arab, Jumeirah
29 February–22 April 2024
Expect: new and existing works by the artist, reflecting on the outcomes of globalisation with a focus on the Middle East's history and its contemporary societies.
Moataz Nasr's latest exhibition urges a critical reflection on the amount of content we are exposed to daily—from information to news and events—leading to what the artist calls 'significant blockage' in societies that trickles into individual lives.
Nasr's centrepiece installation Barzakh (c. 2021) nods to a return to more essential values and histories. Modelled after the first manmade shelters, wooden shovels resembling those used to make bread in public ovens are combined with paddles from migrant boats, linking migration to the food, roof, and knowledge that form basic human needs.
Illustrating the impact of Western cultural imports on traditional societies, Mac Gate (2019) shows the McDonald's logo made of ceramic and concrete decorated with traditional tile motifs, hinting at the growing influence of consumer culture in the Middle East.
Other works seek to spark dialogue between geographies. The bas-relief Shattered Glass (2019) unites the Maghreb states [North African region comprising Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya] with the Middle East to emphasise their shared history and religion. The shattered glass alone nods to cultural disunity and multifaceted religious identities.
El Anatsui: Music, Change and Re-Invention
Efie Gallery, Unit 2, Al Khayat Art Avenue
27 February–27 May 2024
Expect: a rare glimpse into the artist's record collection, alongside early sketches and literature, unfolding new threads into his sculpture.
Offering insight into El Anatsui's cultural influences, over 70 records from the artist's collection are on view, featuring African American musicians and musicians from the African continent such as Johnson Adjan & His Opiri Group, Aretha Franklin, and Guy Warren.
Music is an underpinning influence in Anatsui's visual language, with both having transformed during a period of change across West Africa as it transitioned away from colonial rule.
Shifts in West African music over the 20th century mirror the Ghanaian sculptor's interest in making art that is rooted to the region, notably by setting aside plaster to sculpt with wood, skin, and feathers.
'In most parts of Africa at the time there were movements or syndromes, of going back to look at some of the things that were there before the colonial project started and trying to learn things from the past,' the artist said of the period following Ghana's 1957 independence.
Guest Relations
Jameel Arts Centre, Jaddaf Waterfront
4 November 2023–28 April 2024
Expect: a large-scale inquiry into the nature of modern hospitality in Dubai beyond glitter and glam, unfolding across galleries inspired by hotel floor plans.
Responding to the intense 'touristification' of Dubai, Guest Relations presents artworks, archival material, and architectural research that contextualise the city's growing hospitality sector, developed as a more sustainable complement to the fossil fuel industry.
Work by 34 artists including Pio Abad and Marwa Arsanios explore the transactional nature of modern hospitality, with many using the hotel as a historical subject and site of artistic investigation.
H Facts: Hospitality/Hostility (2003–2007) by Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin comprises six hotel signs inspired by those he encountered in Istanbul in the 1990s. Formerly associated with crime, these neighbourhoods later saw an influx of migrants and refugees from Iran, Iraq, and former Soviet states, reflecting what Alptekin calls a 'bottom-up model of globalisation'.
Commissioned for the U.A.E.'s first pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Familial: Al Jazira Hotel Lobby, Red Sand Hotel Lobby, Al Rabiah Hotel Lobby is Lamya Gargash's documentation of budget hotel rooms in Deira, where newcomers to Dubai often start their lives. The images cast attention to the rarely seen spaces of low-income travellers, in contrast to luxury travel.
Sheher, Prakriti, Devi
Ishara Art Foundation, Unit A3, Alserkal Avenue
19 January–1 June 2024
Expect: works addressing dynamic cities, the natural environment, and the inseparable sacred by artists and collectives working outside the international art circuit.
Recently awarded the 10th Prix Pictet for global photography and sustainability, New Delhi-based artist and photographer Gauri Gill presents her first curatorial project, titled after the Hindustani terms for city, nature, and deity.
The exhibition follows Gill's documentation of India's rural and urban spaces since 2003. 'Rememory' imagines cities as spaces shaped by 'multiple life-worlds': a concrete rod sinks into marshland in one image; in another, a gate opens onto an incomplete road.
Artists on view include Ladhki Devi, a lifelong practitioner of Warli painting, and Vinnie Gill, the artist's mother, who has rendered India's mountainous Nubra Valley, neighbouring trees, and their seasonal transformations for over six decades.
'I wish to acknowledge those who have found ways to stubbornly persist in their practice, often sharing their work only within their families and local communities, completely outside the circuits and networks of professional artists, contemporary art discourse, galleries and markets,' Gauri Gill explained.
Farah Al Qasimi: Toy World
The Third Line, Unit 78, Alserkal Avenue
27 February–19 April 2024
Expect: new photographs and videos exploring present-day surveillance culture and the information age.
Working across photography, film, and music, Farah Al Qasimi documents contemporary culture and society in the Gulf with flair.
But in her latest body of work, the artist sets aside the pastel tones, floral ornaments, and silk fabrics epitomic of the region's opulence, with black-and-white images featured for the first time.
Toy World contends with an age of artificial intelligence, probing the implications of confusion between reality and artifice in media representation. Horse Bucking Teeth (n.d.), referring to the move the animal makes by throwing their head down and hind end upward to express anything from exuberance to nervous energy and pain, shows a horse head in a dark room.
Playful but sinister, the animal's head is looking up with its mouth at the top of its face, as though its teeth were eyes, like an apparition. —[O]
