Art: the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo at the Mosaic Rooms, London

Thanks to a series of carefully curated exhibitions at major institutions throughout London this summer, the British capital is as good a place as any from which to assess the recent past and potential future for contemporary culture in the Arab and wider Muslim world.

While the Design Museum is hosting a show dedicated to the work of the Tunisian couturier Azzedine Alaia, the work of the eight shortlisted finalists for the fifth Jameel Prize can be seen on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

At the other end of Exhibition Road a 20-metre-tall pyramid, The London Mastaba, floats improbably on the Serpentine, the star exhibit in a show that chronicles Christo’s unrequited, four-decade-long love affair with Abu Dhabi, where the 83-year-old artist still hopes to build the largest sculpture in the world.

At the other end of the scale, a display of newly acquired and very mundane objects – a milk bottle, magazines, cigarette packages, a banknote and a vinyl record – strikes just the right note at the British Museum. They are used alongside a video installation by the artist Maha Maamoun in her exhibition The Past is Present: becoming Egyptian in the 20th Century to investigate the interplay between ancient heritage and modern Egyptian identities.

And yet it is another ­modestly-sized show that also aims to bring something of Cairo to London that takes the prize for the exhibition with the best sense of timing.

Staged at The Mosaic Rooms, What do you mean, here we are? commemorates the 20th anniversary of Cairo’s famous Townhouse Gallery and is also part of a series of exhibitions mounted to celebrate The Mosaic Rooms’ tenth anniversary.

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Art: Zarah Hussain’s Numina gives traditional Islamic patterns a digital overhaul

If all goes well, September 1 will be a day that gives Zarah Hussain reason to celebrate.

An artist whose work combines the traditions of Islamic geometrical design with the very latest digital technology, Hussain discovered at the end of July that one of her installations, Numina, had been selected for the Lumen Prize longlist.

An international award that celebrates and promotes digital art and creativity, the Lumen Prize recognises projects that occupy a space where art, research and technology meet, which seems like a pretty good fit for Hussain’s work, sitting as it does at the intersection of science and spirituality, drawing and coding.

This year’s longlist will become a shortlist on September 1 and the winners across 12 categories will then be announced on September 20 in London before embarking on an exhibition tour that will include the Brighton Digital Festival, London’s Winter Lights Festival and Cyberfest 11 in St Petersburg, Russia.

Numina is one of 11 projects competing in the prize’s 3D/sculpture award category alongside projects such as The Storm by Ithaca, an interactive, LED-filled cloud and Seb Lee-Delisle’s The Mindfulness Machine, a robot that makes doodles that are determined by external stimuli such as the number of people watching it, the temperature, the weather, and its own virtual bio­rhythms.

Despite longlisting 93 projects from across the world for the 2017 Lumen Prize, Hussain’s is the only one to relate to the tradition and culture of Islam.

Numina was commissioned by The Barbican Centre in London to accompany its 2016 Transcender season of ecstatic, hypnotic and devotional music, which included performances in the spirit of the Sufi poet Rumi, featuring the Iranian female singer Parissa and the Meshk Ensemble, a group of Turkish dervishes, as well as an evening of Moroccan music from the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar and the young vocal virtuoso, Marouane Hajji.

Hussain’s response was to create a tessellating sculpture that measured about 9 metres by 7 metres and combines this with a looping and morphing digital laser projection and a sound installation composed by students from the nearby Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Numina was exhibited in The Barbican’s foyer between October 2016 and January 2017.

“The Barbican wanted to transform the space so that no matter what you were doing there you would have an artistic experience one way or the other,” Hussain tells me, speaking from London.

“They had absolute faith in me, which from an artist’s point of view was an amazing experience. They said ‘come up with your idea and we’ll support you in doing it’.”

The artist Zarah Hussain. Courtesy Zarah Hussain

In many ways, Numina was the culmination of the many separate projects that have defined Hussain’s artistic career.

This began when she first started painting patterns as a teenager in Macclesfield, near Manchester, developed after her studies at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London and then progressed when she first decided to start animating her designs, all of which stem from Hussain’s faith and love of traditional Islamic patterns and geometry.

“I have always loved art and I have always been interested in grids and numbers and lines and maths – visual mathematics. But when we did art at school, I always thought that there were sections of the world that we did not get to see,” she says .

“Despite this, my art teacher would always try his best to inspire me and one day he brought in a book of Moroccan patterns for me and I immediately thought, ‘that’s it!’.”

Before long, Hussain was trying to deconstruct the patterns she loved in order to recreate them: “I felt that it was part of my cultural tradition and part of where I was from and it really resonated,” Hussain adds.

Unfortunately, when it came to her university career, the pressure of being a child of immigrants, forced the teenage Hussain in a very different direction and she ended up studying English and History before embarking on a career in television.

“After that I started working for the BBC, writing articles and working on their website, which is when I was asked to write about Islamic art,” she says .

“In the course of my research I came across the Prince’s School [of Traditional Arts] and a course that would teach me how to create the patterns that I loved.”

Hussain was accepted into the school on the strength of a portfolio of work that she had produced all the way through her university and TV career. A world-renowned centre for the study of traditional and faith-based arts and crafts, the school was established by the Prince of Wales in 2004 and is one of his core charities and has even held classes in the UAE.

Despite studying with influential geometers and experts in sacred design such as Keith Critchlow, who established the school’s forerunner, the Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts Programme at The Royal College of Art in London in 1984, Hussain experienced a conservatism that was at odds with the experience of digital animating and editing technologies she had gained from working in the media.

“There was a lot of negativity around technology, there was a lot of negativity around contemporary art, conceptual art and modernity,” Hussain says .

“I think there is value in knowing how to draw and paint and to construct geometry by hand but at the same time I think technology is wonderful. Tradition is good and it is a way in and an understanding but it can also ossify and become stagnant and I think it has to evolve,” she says .

“You have to keep pushing the boundaries of what you can do and I like to think that I have kept to the principles and values of the tradition but that my work is also moving it forward.”

Taking its name from a Latin word that associates beauty with a sense of divine presence, Numina is just such a project.

The installation combined an 8-minute long sequence of animated 12-fold geometry inspired by the patterns on an Egyptian minibar, and projected these over a sculpture composed of 42 rhomboids with a simpler hexagonal geometry.

Thanks to the changing light conditions in the Barbican Centre’s foyer, the result was an installation that combined digital animation and laser projection, sound and ambient daylight to a hypnotic effect.

“There were lights in the foyer that could not be turned off and so the installation had to work in a way that was sympathetic to the environment and the context of the Barbican’s brutalist architecture, even when nothing was being projected onto it,” Hussain says .

As visitors who took the time to engage with Numina reported at the time, the effect of the installation was calming and almost trance-like, an effect that was achieved in part by geometry’s the slow and kaleidoscopic progression as it played out over the underlying 3-dimensional shapes.

“For me it is about the experience of being in a space and it being immersive. If you go to the Alhambra or if you look at the muqarnas [honeycomb-shaped vaults] … you walk into these spaces and you draw a breath and you cannot help but feel something,” Hussain says .

“You do not have to be a Muslim, but I think all beings are spiritual beings and everybody has an aspect of their personality that cannot be explained rationally. I am not shoving it down anybody’s throat, I’m just saying come and experience this and see what you feel,” she adds.

“So how do you take those principles and make it modern, or how do you recreate it in art gallery so that people can experience something similar? That’s the idea.”

If Hussain succeeds in making it to the Lumen Prize shortlist on Friday, she will have done so by combining modernity with spirituality to create an artwork that takes its audience to a numinous place, a transcendent journey that’s normally associated with the work of artists such as Mark Rothko and Bridget Riley in gallery spaces and with the detachment of Sufism in Islam.

“When I first started out people would say to me ‘but they’re just pretty patterns’, but I think that is Orientalising and diminishing of a whole series of Muslim cultures that have developed over time,” Hussain tells me.

“But it is not just mathematics. I do believe there is a spiritual way of life underpinning this art that stems from Islam.”

For more details on the Lumen Prize, visit www.lumenprize.com

This article originally appeared in The National

 

Art: Mario Testino’s private collection

On a crisp September afternoon in London, almost 400 lots from a private art collection came up for sale at Sotheby’s, in a much-anticipated auction replete with firsts.

Not only was it the first time that an oil painting by the highly regarded German abstract artist Tomma Abts had ever come up for auction – Zaarke (2000) more than trebled its presale estimate of £35,000 (almost Dh174,000) – but it was also the only time that any of the works from the much-coveted collection had ever been sold.

The collector? The world-famous fashion photographer Mario Testino, a man who has launched modelling careers with the lens of his camera, but also helped to sustain artistic ones thanks to his passion for contemporary art.

The reason? A good cause. Testino will use the proceeds from the sale to support the contemporary art museum he founded in 2012 in his home town of Lima, with the aim of giving local artists a platform for their work and exhibiting international contemporary art in Peru.

Thanks to two sales and an online auction, Testino’s MATE – Museo Mario Testino will benefit from a healthy endowment. The afternoon sale, which featured works by Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Ruff and Ugo Rondinone, generated a cool £6,285,375 (Dh31 million), while the day sale, which also included works by Tracey Emin, Urs Fischer, Luc Tuymans and Shirin Neshat, resulted in sales of £2,423,313 (Dh12m). The top lot in the online sale was Richard Mosse’s Lac Vert, which sold for £28,000 (Dh138,000).

Although the diverse works were, undoubtedly, contemporary, they were also linked by the eye of their collector, which has proved itself to be as brave as it is astute, guided more by the need to be provoked and challenged than soothed. “People always say: ‘You have to buy what you like’, and I’m not so sure of that phrase. I think you almost have to buy what puzzles you, what attracts you and what, at the same time, confuses you, because there needs to be a space for growth,” Testino tells me before the auction.

“What you like is something you’ve already consumed. And once you take it home, it has no space to grow, so you get bored of it quite quickly. Whereas what attracts you, but confuses you, has a long time to grow, and so you can live with it for a much longer time,” says the photographer, who has created campaigns for fashion labels such as Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Hugo Boss, Valentino and Versace.

Guided by such impulses, Testino has been collecting art ever since he started making money from his photography in London in the 1980s – his work first appeared in British Vogue in 1983 – and has benefitted from the feedback of a trusted inner circle of aesthetic advisers, including the photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd (stepbrother to Diana, Princess of Wales) and the art dealer Sadie Coles, whose artists feature heavily in Testino’s collection.

The result is an art collection that is still housed worldwide, much of it in storage, but some of which Testino has also lived with. Works from the sale, such as Anselm Kiefer’s collage H20, hung in the photographer’s kitchen, while Richard Prince’s picture of a girl astride a motorcycle, Untitled (Girlfriend), was not only mounted above the headboard of Testino’s bed, but also featured in a photo shoot with the supermodel Kate Moss.

If Testino’s collection features stellar works by internationally recognised artists, it also contains lesser-known pieces by ones who are just at the beginning of their careers, which means that some of his investments now seem incredibly well-judged, while others appear as acts of patronage.

The sale not only contained incredibly rare and sought-after paintings by 36-year-old artist Tauba Auerbach and works by Laura Owens, whose mid-career retrospective is just about to open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, but also contained pictures that were estimated to sell for as little as £400 (Dh2,000).

“The very important thing is that I collected artists young. The interesting thing for me was that I became so obsessed with it – that my buying was associated with making young artists stay alive almost, because I was buying them quite early on and betting on people that had no proof,” Testino tells me.

“My money was going into things that could make it or couldn’t make it. But I was excited by the process with the artists, participating with the artist’s career and development and growth. They also all surprised me with what they did.”

When I ask if the sale represents an end to his collecting days, the photographer responds with an emphatic “definitely not”.

“I’ll continue to collect and support young artists. The art world is where I feed. It opens my eyes to new things and shifts my consciousness. What I love about it is that it’s constantly challenging us to look at things differently, not necessarily because you like them, but because you are surprised and curious,” he insists.

“Just as photography is a vehicle for me to live a new moment, to go to a new place, meet a new person and so on, art is a process of encounter and discovery. Art is never static.”

This article originally appeared in The National.

Photography: Learning from Gulf Cities at NYUAD

Last week, as the UAE recovered from the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi and braced itself for Dubai Design Week’s exhibitions, conferences, workshops, graduate shows, fairs, pop-up boutiques and the selfie-­inducing Prologue, a sculpture that features more than 8,000 topaz-coloured Swarovski crystals, a very different type of exhibition opened in Abu Dhabi.

Little more than a series of photographs accompanied by statistics, infographics and brief texts displayed in the Project Space at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Learning from Gulf Cities appears modest but its scope and implications could not be more profound.

“See the Gulf, See the World” proclaims a panel while setting out the show’s basic premise: that rather than being exceptional, the cities of the Arabian Gulf are actually extreme architectural laboratories and lenses through which broader international urban trends can be seen.

“Gulf cities are designed and engineered by actors near and far and then, in turn, replicated elsewhere. They are very much part of the global circulation of ideas, investments, designs, technologies, and people”, it continues.

“Rather than celebrate – or simply ridicule and deplore – we look for lessons that are relevant for other cities in the world”, the text concludes, aligning Learning from Gulf Cities with the project that not only provided the show with its inspiration but also with its name.

In 1972, the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour produced one of the most controversial texts of 20th century architectural history, Learning from Las Vegas, an urban study that dared to consider the Las Vegas strip on its own terms and without prejudice, looking for meaning in a place considered monstrous by architects and moralists alike.

“We are a part of the same scholarly tradition,” explains the veteran academic Harvey Molotch, who founded the current project alongside Davide Ponzini, a professor of urban planning at the Politecnico di Milano.

“There was a similarly dualistic reading of Las Vegas – the spectacle of the building and the shows and the suspicion,” he says, drawing parallels between historic and contemporary attitudes to Nevada, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

“The big thrust is to restrain yourself from the presumption that Gulf cities are the product of some diabolical plot and from the adulation of their spectacle and to pull back and to start to encourage people to look at Gulf cities in a different manner.”

Molotch, a professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University, was inspired to find out more about Gulf cities following a brief teaching stint at NYUAD in 2014.

“Coming in from the outside, I became extremely curious about the mechanisms that hold this place together: politically, economically and culturally. I found the whole place puzzling, so I started trying to learn as much as I could about the region and Davide’s was one of the articles that captured my attention,” Molotch says of the colleague with whom he has since formed an “intellectual marriage”.

“There is a difficulty in interpreting so many things here because they do not match with any urban theory that we have encountered before and we both realised that we needed different intellectual tools,” Ponzini explains.

“We also wanted to reframe the work that so many Gulf scholars have been doing by saying that Gulf cities are extreme, but they are not exceptional and to try to connect what local area specialists know about Gulf cities to a more global understanding of urbanisation at large.”

It wasn’t long before Molotch and Ponzini were joined by the third member of their urban trifecta, Michele Nastasi, an Italian architectural photographer who has not only been researching the region for more than a decade, but who also worked with Ponzini on the publication that alerted the academics to each other in the first place, Starchitecture: Scenes, Actors, and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities (2016).

In its particular combination of Ponzini’s words with Nastasi’s images, not only did Starchitecture help to set a visual and methodological precedent for Learning From Gulf Cities but it also helped to identify many of the locations, companies and individuals who now feature in the NYUAD show, which compares carefully composed images of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and Riyadh with pictures of London, New York, Barcelona, Baku and Milan.

A hugely experienced architectural photographer, Nastasi is at pains to contrast the kind of images he has made for Learning From Gulf Cities with the more usual photographs that depict architecture in the region.

“The idea of representation is crucial. Most architectural photography is paid for by the architects who have designed the buildings and with the crisis of editorial work in magazines and reviews most websites and blogs don’t have the budget to commission photographers,” the photographer says.

“They just publish whatever the architects send them and that’s a problem because the images are becoming more and more promotional, so this is an effort to separate myself from the market and the system and to develop the eye of a passer-by,” he adds.

In a series of images that contrast panoramas with street views and that record buildings in their social as well as their physical context, Nastasi not only attempts to illustrate the concepts and ideas developed by Ponzini and Molotch, but also develops a thesis about the role images can play in promoting a more critical approach to urban life.

“I wanted to try and see the architecture in its place with all of the contradictions of those places. It’s not so difficult, you just have to widen your view and concentrate on the multiplicity of elements that make up a city and to give you the sense of being there. It’s more than the building, it’s the environment, there are the people, the public space, the streets,” he says.

“We have to take care about what images are doing to us. Trying to deconstruct the rules of images and how they are used and circulated is an act of consciousness about our built environment and society.”

A photograph of Emaar Square in Istanbul is a case in point. Featuring a landmark tower designed by Foster and Partners, the development includes an Emaar Square Mall, the Address Hotel and residences and the kind of standard retail units, fountains and finishes that make it difficult to locate. A large outdoor screen dominates the square and carries an image of Downtown Dubai, which is proclaimed as “The Centre of Now”.

As well as Istanbul, the exhibition also includes other images of what Nastasi describes as a “placeless geography”.

“The idea is that there is a circulation of money, investments, ideas and designs but what I am trying to stress as a photographer, is that there is also a circulation of images and that these images also help to drive the transformation of cities,” the photographer insists.

“Sometimes you will hardly recognise where you are. This is something that is a consequence of only concentrating on images and the surface of things. If you see a skyline from afar, it is a spectacle that gives you the idea of a modern city but that is completely different from the impression you get when you enter the city and pass through the streets.”

Several micro-studies in Learning From Gulf Cities investigate the spread of these increasingly common urban features, an effective denial of unique notions of place that has been described by the architectural historian Nasser Rabbat as “Dubai Syndrome”.

In Similar Forms, Different Landings, the exhibition looks at the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that architectural designs appear and reappear around the world, belying the claims to sensitivity and specificity often made by contemporary architects.

Building on research they conducted for their Starchitect project, Ponzini and Nastasi compare Atelier Jean Nouvel’s 38-storey Torre Agbar in Barcelona, whose location they approve of, with the firm’s 46-storey Burj Doha, proposing that buildings travel, but landmarks cannot.

“Meaningful buildings and places need to be designed and developed and discussed and eventually redesigned for specific places and for the communities that exist in those places. That’s a meaningful way of making cities,” Ponzini insists, ignoring the fact that even when a building is developed, it still has to function as a piece of architecture to be a success.

In January, the Torre Agbar was sold for the second time in three years as it continues to be the focus of disappointed tenants who have complained of “dirty windows, an awkward donut-shaped floor plan and inoperable sun blinds”, just come of the gripes reported the online design publication, Dezeen.

 

Another panel investigates three schemes by the architects Broadway Malyan, whose 2007 design for waterside apartment buildings at Al Bandar in Abu Dhabi, which was completed in 2011, then reappeared at Battersea Reach in London in 2014 at the same time as a similar scheme in Port Baku.

The UK scheme had actually been designed first but had taken 14 years to come to fruition, whereas the project in Azerbaijan, which was more than 10 times as large, took only five years from appointment to completion.

“Gulf cities act as urban ‘test beds’ for architectural, engineering and design experiments,” a panel in the exhibition states. “Encouragement comes from ‘fast-track governance’, ready capital, and low-cost labour; citizen opposition does not stand in the way.”

After two years of research, workshops in Abu Dhabi, New York and Milan and exhibitions at NYU and now NYUAD, the team behind Learning From Gulf Cities is now on the verge of producing a book, published by New York University Press, that will draw on the work of some of the 50 or so academics and professionals who have contributed to the project thus far.

At its best, Learning From Gulf Cities combines research into issues such as the international real estate investment and development patterns of bodies such as the Qatar Investment Authority, Emaar and DP World and illustrates how these have tangible and increasingly international urban effects.

When these are combined with Nastasi’s images, the effect can be as alarming as it is revelatory.

“The exhibition is not here to celebrate Gulf cities and it’s not here to deplore them,” says Ponzini. “We want to suspend judgement in order to come back with more refined ideas.”

Despite all of attempts at objectivity and nuance, however, the exhibition points to a number of incredibly hard and often unpalatable lessons that planners, architects and developers are likely to want us to forget.

This article was originally published in The National

Art: Imperfect Chronology – Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary

On September 8, an exhibition billed as “the broadest single overview of Arab art to be shown in the UK to date” opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Kamal Boullata
La Ana Illa Ana (There Is No ‘I’ But ‘I’) 1983 Silkscreen 60 x 40 cm
Image Courtesy of Meem Gallery / Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

By the time it finishes in 2017, more than 100 works from Sheikh Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi’s Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation will have featured in Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary in a series of four separate chronological exhibitions that will chart the development of Arab art and aesthetics from their 20th-century origins to the present.

The show’s curator, Omar Kholeif, has described the exhibition as an attempt to outline “a possible trajectory of recent Arab art” at a “time of hyperactivity across the Arab art world”, which in plain English amounts to an ambitious statement of intent.

The Cairo-born and London-based Kholeif is uniquely qualified to make such statements, being both a product of and participant in the “hyperactivity” he describes.

In 2014, the Dubai-based Canvas Magazine named Kholeif, who also acts as a senior editor at Ibraaz, a website and biannual online publication dedicated to the visual culture of North Africa and the Middle East, as one of the 50 most powerful people in the Middle Eastern art world, and since then his stock has only risen.

For the rest of this article, please see The National