Jonathan Gent, 'Beautiful Foot'
Jonathan Gent, 'Disappear'
"If I look familiar, it's because I look like a fat Jodie Foster," proclaimed Jonathan Gent after we left his studio in the XVA gallery and I had decided that I was eager to include his painting, "My last meal before my execution," in 'Regional Delicacies: Alef's Art Mezze.' I was originally hoping to have two works by New York-based artist Will Cotton in the show. Will was my inspiration for structuring a show around food, but practical realities about bringing his work to Dubai burst my candy-floss bubble, leaving one room empty among the eight that the XVA had reserved for the exhibition. That room was sitting like a black hole sucking out my enthusiasm until I saw Jonni's painting beaming at me in the bright Dubai daylight.
And after I surmounted the strange sensation that Jodi Foster might be playing the part of the man across the table from me, I became convinced that both Jonni and his paintings were exceptionally easy to love. That was the moment when I realized that the show was going to be amazing.
Minutes after I experienced this revelation, Jonni's deceptively endearing electric blue painting was being carried from the courtyard where he resides as an XVA artist in residence, and Jay Batlle had arrived to install his sound installation and twenty napkins painted with wine, coffee, food-coloring and pencil. I introduced Jonni and Jay, and after realizing that I'd successfully curated a new best-friendship, I went to the house to oversee the logistical issues of organizing the show.
Jay Batlle, 'Napkin Stains', 2006
food coloring, coffee, wine, ink, and pencil on restaurant linen napkins
approx 19.5" x 19.5" unframed
After positioning and hanging the art, I noticed the glaringly ugly dead tree, wire tumbleweed and withered palm leaf situated in the center of the space where a beautiful, fenced-in courtyard had probably once housed a garden. Knowing there was no way that this empty ugliness could be ignored, I started running around the Creek Art Fair looking for food-themed sculptures to hijack. Isabelle van den Eynde, the Belgian-born director of the B21 gallery here in Dubai was installing three massive shiny metal pears by Arnaud Rivieren in the courtyard near the XVA entrance. They suddenly seemed irresistibly appealing, and I begged Mona for one to put in my show. But when Isabelle confronted the artist, we were told that the pears had to be installed together. And while the artist also had a sculpture of cherries, that one was set to be installed at Art Dubai. When I asked whether there was anything else lying around somewhere, Isabelle said no and sent me away with the sneer, "he doesn't only make fruit, you know."
Arnaud Rivieren's pears
So, back to the drawing board. I gathered up Jay and we went to stare at the space in the courtyard. "Cocks," he said. "Fighting cocks."
Amazingly, at that moment, I was thinking that chickens would be nice. So we went to find Mona Hauser, XVA's director to propose our idea. Instead of dismissing us, she added to our intended menagerie by suggesting that we have goats live in the courtyard for the duration of the show, and then gave me the name of a man to call who might be a source of some living art.
Thankfully, when I went to use the gallery phone, Mitra and Daniel, the rational and extremely capable managing directors of the gallery, supplied a little reality. "The goats will eat the art. And the chickens will make a mess everywhere." Realizing that as a New Yorker, I have limited experience with creatures more exotic than pigeons, squirrels and rats, I deferred to their wisdom and Olivia, the warm and wonderful Executive Editor of Alef, went to gather fruit instead.
Sara Rahbar
Fruit was good. Thinking about it, fruit had the advantage of smelling better in the hot sun than over-heated farm animals, and thematically fruit fit the show better since Sara Rahbar's art uses pomegranates as a motif that evokes her Iranian cultural tradition. By the time the fruit arrived, Esma Pacel Turam, her husband, and Sara had joined us. Sara arranged her installation, while Esma organized the lighting so that her graceful silicon curtains cast charming shadows on the walls behind them.
Lively, insightful, funny and fun to be with, Sara's company can make any mundane activity entertaining. We opened the bags of oranges, lemons, pears and pomegranates and started to place them strategically in the space.
Then, "Can I throw these?" Jay asks while the orange he has already thrown is in mid-flight.
After we happily compete to see who can get fruit impaled on the tree trunk stub, and I win, we return to the XVA café, where Fereydoun volunteers to create an installation in the room where the absence of electrical light seemed too problematic to install art. Away from his home in Iran, and having lost family in the past year, Fereydoun wanted to form a series of Nourouz table settings resting on a blanket of grass under the traditional mirror since there were some strips of fresh grass remaining from his solo show in one of the XVA's interior galleries. A grass path runs from the gallery door down the steps and then up to the exhibition room, where the materials all emanate an appealing home-like smell.
During the Nourouz festival, everyone celebrates the Iranian New Year with fire-works, jumping over live flames and setting of the table with seven symbolic items which all begin with the letter 'S.' The belief is that each item symbolizes a significant blessing for the new year. As Fereydoun explains to me, the "senjid," or dried fruit, which he has included as a pile of apricots on each mirror, symbolizes love. Garlic, whose name is "seer" in Persian, symbolizes health, as does "seeb" - apples. Glasses of vinegar called "serkoh" represent wisdom and patience. Gilded coins which are "Seekeh" in Persian (or a more budget-friendly option, sweets wrapped in gold foil) bring wealth, as do the goldfish swimming in bowls. Surrounding the setting are candles, which Fereydoun lights nightly.
Created impromptu and using materials bought at the shops within a few blocks of the gallery, the installation is one of the most moving and poetic pieces I have encountered. But the casualties among the poor fish, whose death count rises despite everyone's best wishes and efforts, reinforces the conclusion that fruit, not livestock, was the right move.
The birds who steal pomegranate seeds from the "installation" Jay, Sara and I made on the courtyard tree seem to agree, and so do the people who come to the opening on the first night of the Creek Art Fair. Before the fair, Olivia and I are in a panic because we can't find Pinar Yolacan. I had talked to her twice during the day but she was sleeping off jetlag and then she wasn't in her room when I was changing for the opening. Finally we abandon hope and leave, so that we can open the show on time.
When we get there, Joudran Real Estate, the Dubai-based sponsor for the show, had set up a spread of real, not metaphoric, food, and people started milling around to watch a video installed in the lounge which showed a surveillance system Joudran produced to enable construction companies to oversee building progress by remote. I was more concerned with finding my missing artist.
When Pinar arrived, she had a great excuse. She had been to the beach and fallen asleep, but apparently she drifted off in such a position that one side of her face was burnt while other wasn't. She looked somewhat like a soccer fan, but a very chic one with an eighties-style red silk shirt, black leggings and silver heels. Her work received universal admiration from the viewers streaming through the show.
Drifting with Pinar, Jay and Sara between Alef's opening, the roof-top where people sipped wine and lounged lavishly on pillows, and the other 22 other galleries' areas, I got the sense that the Creek Art Fair, and not the upcoming Art Dubai, offered real insight into the culture's profound character and most progressive aspects.
Most compelling are "Presence," the series of photographs by Emeriti artist Lamya Gargash in The Third Line/ Bidoun house. Gargash photographed the decorated interiors of houses and structures abandoned for demolition in the Emirates. Her images of the inanimate victims of the constant construction and obsession with newness that defines much of Dubai's aesthetic and mentality are utterly haunting.
Iranian painter Farideh Lashai's "Across Boundaries, Across Centuries" special installation offers a distinctly Iranian appropriation of Manet's "Le dejeauner sur l'herbe." Lashai, who is known for her arrestingly gestural paintings of nature, riffs off of Manet's own system of quotation and homage in order to employ his iconic image of an idyllic decadent picnic as a counterpoint the violent images that currently represent the Middle East to the wider world.
The smallness of the wide world is hilariously represented in a sound installation by Lebanese artist Nadim Karam, who overlaps tourists adds into a Tower of Babal blurr, tempting listeners to come to a random array of identical sounding exotic locations.
Equally powerful are Amadou Kan-Si's colorful large-scale paintings of men in various prayer poses. Sweet and lively from a distance, the delicate lines and flow of Kan Si's images are an intimate display of the artist's love for his faith and deep devotion. Specific to Kan Si's faith, the work is universally appealing.
Harder to navigate are cultural differences. I spent the first morning alone manning the exhibition, since the artists and my Alef colleagues had come in on mostly 2am flights. Thus, I am sitting by myself in the house when four men arrive. Statuesque and wearing full thawb, the white gowns of traditional Arab masculine dress, three of them glower at me with evident stern disapproval. Among them is a smaller, ill-kempt man in a polo shirt and kakis. I offer my assistance and the casually dressed man smiles broadly while the other three glower harder, so I retreat. They walk through each room with no apparent pleasure until they get to Jay's installation. Then the man in the shirt beckons me out of the office and points to a naked waiter among Jay's many drawings. The three men behind him cross their arms and wait for my defense. "Child?" the head critic asks me. I realize that this could be awkward at best, and possibly just really bad. Figuring that nudity is a no-no and not wanting to get myself or anyone else in trouble, I panic. The first thing I do is pretend to not understand. But I'm apparently still on the hook. "He is child?" the man elaborates.
Deciding that "yes," might not soothe their sensitivities, I do the only thing I can do when cornered. I start babbling in fast, adamant academic-speak. I happily gesture and laugh in the self-righteous, mirthless way people laugh at conferences when someone slips a little academic insider quip to the audience. I talk about simulacra and gender theory and lots of interesting sounding 'isms'. None of it really says anything but that's fine, and even people who are fluent in academic jargon rarely say anything anyway. So I just keep talking.
The man who'd voiced the initial inquiry makes agreeable noises, and then the three men behind him nod more and more frantically until, luckily, I scare them away. I keep talking at them until they get out the door and then I smile and thank them for the wonderful conversation and run back to the lounge to read the copy of Grazia Middle East that I'd squirreled away behind the seat.
Later, I realized my brilliant tactic might have been less than well-advised. That night there was a lecture on "Art Censorship and Freedom of Expression," in which Fereydoun told about his experiences being black-listed in Iran, curator Janet Rady gave an overview of UK censorship law, and Jack Persekian, the founder of Jerusalem's Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art recounted his experiences navigating legal and cultural boundaries in Sharjah Biennial and Jonni drank whiskey and summed up humanity's purpose with the statement "we don't understand ourselves, so we make stuff." At one moment the eloquent moderator Arsalan Mohammad, the former Art Editor of Time Out Dubai, explained what is legally not allowed in the Emirates. Obscenity and profanity were ones I knew about, but I got scared when he said another no-no is "confusing the public." So I had unwittingly brushed up against two red lines in front of my glowering guests by showing an abstract drawing of a nude and then talking nonsense about it.
Thankfully, my nonsense was the only nonsense in the show.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine. She is Art Editor of Alef (alefmag.com/) and contributes regularly to such publications as Style.com, Grazia, Tank, Sleek and Harper's Bazaar.
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