Art of the matter

Dubai - As Hong Kong-based curator Hammad Nasar takes up the reins at the UAE Pavilion for the 2017 Venice Biennale, he tells us why Arab art is poised to take its place in the international art world

 If a theatre actor's dream is to per-form at London's West End and a product designer's ultimate aim to show at Design Miami or Design Basel, for anyone in the art world, it's all about the Venice Biennale. It started in 1893, when the Venetian City Council passed a resolution to set up a biennial exhibition of Italian art. International artists would be allowed by invitation only. By 1948, however, the event had become the hub of the industry. That was the year American art collector Peggy Guggenheim displayed her collection - and it started a whole new wave in the industry. Countries today take great pride in curating their respective pavilions, making the Venice Biennale one of the most important global cultural events to watch out for and attracting about 400,000 visitors every year.
The UAE is a relative newcomer to the event, having had its pavilion since 2009 - yet its presence at the Biennale keeps strengthening with every passing year. The National Pavilion UAE is commissioned by the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation and supported by the Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development. For the next edition, which will take place from May to November next year, the country's exhibition will explore the artistic practices of the UAE through the analogy of 'play'. Taking up the reins is Hammad Nasar, who was recently announced curator for the UAE Pavilion. Currently the Head of Research and Programs at Hong Kong's Asia Art Archive, Nasar was previously a Fellow at the Clore Leadership Programme and a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, London. He has curated exhibitions of Asian art all over the world, including a show at the British Museum and Dubai's The Third Line. A regular at Art Dubai and Sharjah Biennial, and having attended Abu Dhabi Art as well, he says, "In the field of Asian art, the UAE is an increasingly important centre, where artists from the region are not only practising... but also being represented, supported, shown and collected. This growing ecosystem is broader in reach (covering the MENASA region) than most other cities or regions with global ambitions in the art world. And the UAE has become a place where international curators and collectors come to 'discover' artists, practices or scenes."
Representing a young nation at Venice Biennale, Nasar will need to exercise a careful eye when it comes to finalising his selections from the UAE. Says the curator, "In my studio visits and conversations with artists, critics, curators and supporters in the Emirates, I have noted that even those who have not had the opportunity to visit the UAE's previous pavilions in Venice have a detailed knowledge of them, through publications and discussions. This obviously means that the UAE's presentation at Venice is something of importance to the local artistic community, as a vital contribution to their collective conversation." Though based in Hong Kong, you can expect to see a lot more of Nasar in the UAE over the next few months, and a full-time team has already been set up to support him.
The curator's love affair with art from the region goes back almost a decade. "When I was in the UAE in 2007, assisting the curatorial team of the 8th Sharjah Biennial during their final stages of preparation, the artist Mohammed Kazem (one of the curators) very kindly gave me a catalogue of a recent exhibition he had curated called 'Window: 16 UAE Artists'. This was liter-ally my first window into the kind of art being practised in the UAE, and I have been going through it ever since."
Having an outsider's perspective can often add depth to curation. Nasar has been attending every edition of the Sharjah Biennial, and keeps his eye on several key galleries in Dubai, including The Third Line and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, which Nasar calls pioneers in the region. Also on the list are Green Art Gallery, Grey Noise and Lawrie Shabibi. Though he can-not comment on which artists have made his shortlist for the pavilion, he does talk about local talent, whose work has made an impression on him. "Picking favourites is tricky," he notes. "There are so many exhibitions I have seen in the UAE that have left an impression: from dramatic individual works - like Wael Shawky's 'Dictums 10:120' or Imran Qureshi's 'Blessings Upon the Land of My Love' or Nadi Kaabi-Linke's 'Flying Carpets' - to survey exhibitions that reveal distinctive and important artistic voices, such as Hassan Sharif's 'Experiments & Objects 1979-2011' and 'Ibrahim el-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist', or outstanding long-duration projects, such as Abdullah al Saadi's 'Al Zannoba Journey'. This is but a small sample. I can go on and on."
Of course, the works will need to fit with the theme, 'Aspects of Play'. The idea came to Nasar from his first connection with art in this region, the 2007 Mohammed Kazem catalogue. "I was introduced to a diverse set of artistic strategies that involved collection, repetition, the application of seemingly arbitrary rules, propositions that seemed like flights of fancy (e.g. Mohamad Ahmad Ibrahim's pro-posed 'Hole in Khor Fakkan Mountains'), record-keeping through diaries and photographs, gestures based on experimentation, and performance. These practices and projects were diverse in form but seemed to share an attitude of playful-ness, and an interest in ideas of marking presence, time, place and a very grounded, everyday notion of belonging."
'Play' can mean different things to different people, so it gives Nasar a broad band-width to work with - yet keeps things within a framework that will, hopefully, enable him to put together a pavilion that re-ally shows the world the depth and scope of art from the UAE.
sujata@khaleejtimes

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