Even just a couple of years ago, it would have been difficult to anticipate the words ‘Middle East’, ‘contemporary art’ and ‘Chelsea’ occurring in the same sentence. Unveiled shows part of the collection of advertising mogul-turned-collector-cum-dealer Charles Saatchi whose ability to talent-spot emerging artists, making both reputations and staggering fortunes in the process, has been the phenomenon of a generation.

Saatchi has been turning his extremely influential attention to an area stretching from Tunisia to Teheran for some time. The fact that his show coincides, fortuitously, with Emirati Expressions in Abu Dhabi and Art Dubai should allow Unveiled to be recognised as the ‘gold standard’ for both young and established artists in the UAE. Artists, art teachers and professors, gallery owners and collectors have already seen the stunning and captivating British Museum show Word into Art which was hosted by DIFC in April 2008; Unveiled offers the Gulf art community a benchmark for art being made — as opposed to displayed or sold — in the Gulf. Tellingly, one of the UK’s most high profile critics, Waldemar Januszczak, writing in The Times, contrasted Unveiled with the Triennial exhibition at London’s Tate Modern which shows that “modern British art is clapped out.” Looking for sources of powerful new art he comments:  “On the surprising evidence of the new Saatchi show… the Middle East could be a significant location.” Indeed it could.

The show-stopping centre-piece, by Paris-based artist Kader Attia, is Ghost (2007), some 250 life-size tin foil body-casts representing Muslim women at prayer. You encounter the work first from behind, seeing the backs of kneeling shapes, upright or inclined; only slowly does it become clear these shining forms are hollow, the void inside impenetrably dark. The cheap disposable material found in every kitchen in the world makes Attia’s work accessible and universal: some critics argue it signifies the emptiness of Muslim women’s lives, but, since the crumpled, mirrored surfaces reflect the viewer, that supposed ‘emptiness’ works both ways, inviting contemplation of the absence of spirituality in contemporary secular societies. People close their eyes to pray and the mysterious darknesses of Attia’s work become an allusion to the unknowability of personal religious experience. Female identity and daily experience are explored in Sadi Ghadirian’s C-prints showing women formally posed in the flower patterned chadors worn at shrines in Iran or the costumes of the Ghajar period. Individuals are associated with household objects — a sieve, rubber gloves, a vacuum cleaner, either placed anachronistically in a 19^th century setting or replacing the subject’s face so that woman, object and task become conflated. Ghadirian may see women’s lives as constrained by domesticity, but the inventiveness, humour and impact of these large scale images reveal her ambitions. Working in Teheran, Ghadirian transforms her Iranian female ‘types’ into ‘everywoman’: we get the jokes, we empathise, we know about feisty women finding a way to communicate, regardless of restrictions.

The Ghajar period also informs Ramin Haerizadeh’s re-configurations of 19^th century miniatures with perversely morphed figures, gender-bending images of seduction, all lusciously painted detail of hair, patterned textiles and body decoration. Shirin Fakhim has another take on contemporary Iran: a provocative, taboo-breaking life sized mixed-media installation of Teheran prostitutes, sharp with bitter wit, outrage at hypocrisy, profound and sympathetic sadness. Locate these works just steps away from the smart boutiques of the King’s Road and it becomes clear why this exhibition, presented at fashionable London’s most stylish core, is reverberating round the world from Brazil to Hong Kong.

The cultural centre of gravity in the west has constantly shifted: from Italy in the 16^th century to Spain in the 17^th and England and Scotland in the 18^th. French innovation dominated the 19^th century (with debts to Japan after 1860), while in the 20^th century individual cities took over the spotlight in successive decades: Paris, Moscow, Milan, Amsterdam, New York and London. Recently, and swiftly, Dubai and Abu Dhabi have been re-invented as showcases to display, buy and sell art, often western or the art of the past. But everything happening in Gulf culture — Emirati Expressions, conceived by two young Emirati curators, Art Dubai, the efforts of local dealers showing works by artists based in the UAE — is unquestionably enriched by the context orchestrated by Saatchi making available compelling work, made yesterday, drawing on the creative mainsprings in some of the world’s most conflicted locations. And, for the first time, Emirati artists are firmly in that orbit.

More than 80 paintings are included in Unveiled, a surprise no doubt to international commentators who have been confidently asserting that ‘painting is dead’ since about 1850. Among those referencing art’s history is Hayv Kahraman. Her exquisite, meditative essays on Iraqi female identity are meticulously crafted, their smooth surfaces peopled by decorative, graceful female figures, the spare rigour of her canvases recalling the flat stillness of 18^th century Japanese woodcuts. In contrast, Tala Madani’s paintings use a combination of deliberate clumsiness and fluid brush marks to create cutting visions of a male world: rituals, sexual (mis)adventure, machismo, vanity and violence. In the paintings and drawings selected by Saatchi, the range of emotional registers and varied techniques are impressive, and saturated with topical allusion, from Ahmad Morsedloo’s juxtapositions of the social subject in Iran to Ahmad Alsoudani’s explosive, kaleidoscopic Baghdad 1 (2008). To gallery audiences in London who thought they ‘knew’ that Islamic culture ‘doesn’t do the figure’ the preponderance of figurative work in the Saatchi collection will be a revelation. Work that is ‘non figurative’, however, often catches at the throat even more, siphoning the fractured realities of Palestine, Lebanon or Iraq off our casual television screens and breakfast newspapers, presenting them with an ‘avoid me now, if you can…’ immediacy.  In Beirut Caoutchouc (2004-08) Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui lays the tensions of his ravaged city quite literally at our feet. Crisp lines incise Beirut’s street plan precisely into a black rubber mat, creating a piece that hugs the gallery floor, flattened almost in self-preservation, the dark materials imbuing an atmosphere of menace. Close by is a buckling model of his abandoned Beirut apartment block, an elegy mourning a country, a displaced people, and a catastrophe of separation.

Ramallah-based artist Wafa Hourani’s Qalandi 2067 (2008) is also about significant place. A model of a refugee camp, located in a future 100 years after the Six Day War, it is imagined as a tragic toy-town for adults. Weaving through its maze-like streets, past the battered dingy greys and sharp glimpses of heroic determination to survive, we finally come up against the check point in the West Bank security fence, its blue and white flag fluttering, to confront, a little shell-shocked, the abundant juicy glamour beyond.

Unveiled succeeds not only because of what the show is, but also because of what it is not, and it isn’t another turn on the cultural merry go-round for Europeans or Americans. Scornful of curators who need ‘famous’ artists and institutional narratives to back up their aesthetic sensibilities, Saatchi is scathing about art’s movers and shakers. He refers to ‘big-name globetrotting international mega-event curators’ and their ‘dead-eyed, soulless, rent-a-curator exhibitions’, and is also dismissive of those who lack both the confidence and judgement to buy art themselves, preferring an ‘army of art advisers building “portfolio” collections for their clients’.

Yet Saatchi himself is ‘curating’, and while many of the works are brilliant in conception, there is the slipperiness of using geographical boundaries to put art into boxes. Given that 10 of the artists were born in Iran, and over half of them live in the US and Europe, the title new art from the Middle East is problematic. New art by Iranians in a broader context might be more accurate, if not exactly snappy title. 

‘Middle East’ isn’t really a term that embraces cultural experiences as different as those generated by the DIFC’s Gate, the coffee shops of Byblos, or the maidan in Isfahan. It denies the variety that characterises Unveiled. Here, the languages used underline the consciousness of a global art community. Observing all this from Scotland, a better title might be ‘Art from Europe’s nearest neighbours’. That would stress not the ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ of these artists but their ability to translate, into compelling forms, the most arresting and urgent subjects of our times.

Works in Unveiled are available to view online via the virtual gallery at 
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk

Geraldine Prince is Director of the Centre for Continuing Studies at Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland