CHANGING AUDIENCES

Text: Aasim Akhtar
Photography: Courtesy Art Dubai

With a population of running into millions, an architectural boom that embraces vertical fantasies straight out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and roving bands of young artists ready to mount ad hoc shows of a few days’ duration in the old port’s countless disused warehouses and excess office-tower spaces, Dubai now seems too diverse, too energetic and too commercial to be held in check by social strictures. 

 

Sited in Madinat Jumeirah, the recent Art Dubai 2011 brought together 82 international art galleries from across the world. (A bit of legerdemain was employed to beef up the foreign contingent!). Art Dubai’s 5th venue is both daunting and picturesque, is an imposing baked-clay fortress. The Fair was part of a much larger arts festival that also included a collaboration with the Global Arts Forum_5. Established alongside the first Art Dubai, it began as the grandest of talk shops. For the first time, however, it took up partnership with four cities in the Gulf: Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai and Doha. At Art Dubai, it focused on two narratives this year: Fascination: How Art Met Fashion and Disappointment Managenent: Artists and Audiences. But the real visual-arts action took place, guerrilla fashion, in group shows with no official link to the 10th International Sharjah Biennial, next door. These alternative displays, focused exclusively on cutting-edge art work, were mounted in various booths, drawing foreign visitors (along with artists from all across the globe) into a dynamic dialogue with the local artistic community. 

 

A renowned Director, Antonia Carver, provided the now requisite vision for the fair that aimed to counter ‘Western-centricism’ with a healthy mix of self-realising ‘Orientality’ and eclectic globalism. After years of isolation, Dubai has reemerged as the prime site of Emirates’ new push toward modernization, offering the entire Middle East world a model of cultural hybridity that, retaining the best of indigenous traditions assimilates Western goods and concepts without being utterly captive to foreign ways. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of all the activities was the seamlessness with which ‘advanced’ Middle Eastern work – and, by implication, progressive Middle Eastern thinking – merged into the standard categories of Western art practice. Such openness to cultural fusion is, so to speak, no small matter.

Mercifully, the official fair was not gerrymandered into national sections or pretentiously titled thematic subdivisions. Works seemed instead to be situated according to their formal rapport with the space and each other – a radical curatorial concept that some Western museums might do well to readopt. Painting was the most contested category, for it was here that the organizers most diligently sought to accommodate, without utterly capitulating to, conservative hometown taste. There is power behind old-school local preference. This was probably the first fair in which modes other than painting made up at least quarter of the works. Indeed, installation art – viewed by most government authorities as alien and potentially disruptive – was shown …where ancient forms of calligraphy and ink painting remain basic requirements in the art academies and where old-guard traditionalists hold many positions of bureaucratic influence.