Linguistic twist: is Arabic in crisis?

Throughout the Arab world, young people are rejecting classical Arabic in favour of a mish-mash of English and their own local dialects – ‘Arabish’ – a popular chat language that mixes the two, writes Nick Leech.

When Jihad El Eit opened the first branch of his fast food business in Dubai, he relied on little more than gut instinct when it came to choosing a name. At the time, ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ seemed like an inspired choice. Not only did it fit with the company’s contemporary take on traditional Arabic street food but it also used the Arabic chat alphabet in its name, a phonetic mish-mash of Arabic sounds and Roman characters that has become one of the most common and convenient modes of written communication for Arabic-speaking youth.

In the phonetic Arabic chat alphabet, ‘Man2ooshe’ becomes ‘Man’oushey’ because the ‘2’ is used to represent a pause between syllables in Arabic. The name spoke directly to the young, hip, Arabic but English-speaking market Jihad El Eit was aiming for.

Unfortunately, ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ soon became the victim of its own success, as non-Arabic speakers, unfamiliar with the phonetic transliteration that defines the Arabic chat alphabet, also started to demand the firm’s home-made take on traditional Middle Eastern snacks such as manakeesh, burek, and minikeesh.

“We never expected a non-Arabic audience to be interested in our food,” explains El Eit. “As more Western and Asian customers started coming to our stores, they didn’t understand what the ‘two’ meant. Some people started calling us ‘mantooshey’. Some people thought we were called ‘man-two-ooshey’. The name started to distract from the essence of the brand.”

Three years and five Man2ooshe stores later, El Eit wanted to expand his business further, but felt he had no choice but to employ the services of a consultancy to remedy the issue surrounding the brand’s name. The result was what the chief executive now describes as a “costly facelift”. ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ became ‘Man’oushe Street’ and no longer employs the Arabic chat alphabet in its branding, menus or signage.

“We didn’t do our homework properly when we started in terms of acceptance of the brand,” El Eit explains. “If we had used a generic texting message that was understood by all audiences, I don’t think we would have changed our name, but we used an Arabic word with a twist of English and that created confusion. I regret it now because I paid much more for the rebrand than I did when we started.”

While El Eit’s experience may provide a salutary business lesson for companies targeting non-Arabic speakers, the exponential growth of the Arabic chat alphabet since the 1990s has led to a sea change in the way the language is written by young people across the Arabic-speaking world. Arabish or Arabizi (a contraction of Arabic and Inglizi) even appears in advertising and on TV, especially on youth-oriented shows and channels such as Na3na3 on MTV Middle East. Throughout the Arabic speaking world, Arabish has become a default for written communication among the young in text messages, in email and online.

The preponderance of Arabish in the digital realm should come as no surprise. The language was born online during the 1990s, when operating systems, web browsers, personal computers, keyboards and keypads were unable to support Arabic.

The only readily available option at the time was to use the Roman fonts and characters defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a character-encoding scheme based on the English language that defined the 128 characters – including the numerals 0-9 and the letters A-Z – that appear on printers, keyboards, computers and communication equipment. Originally developed for telegraphic communication, ASCII soon became the effective lingua franca of the internet, a huge benefit to languages written in Roman script, but a massive problem for the users of different alphabets.

Arabic speakers responded to the absence of Arabic script in two ways: some used English, but many more began to use Roman characters to recreate the appearance and the sounds of Arabic words. Arabic was effectively ASCII-ised so that it could be written on a standard keyboard, and numerals were enlisted to represent specific Arabic sounds that do not occur in English. The number 5 became kha; 6 became taa; 8 qa and so on. It was from this ingenuity and the desire to communicate that Arabish was born.

David Palfreyman, a linguist based at Zayed University in Dubai, was the co-author of a 2003 research paper, A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use: Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging, one of the first academic studies of ASCII-ised Arabic. Palfreyman had arrived in the UAE in 1999 and soon became interested in the way the university’s female students were making use of technology and social media to express themselves.

“I’m interested in the creative aspect of ASCII Arabic and how the issue is playing out in a society that is changing,” Palfreyman explains. When the linguist conducted his research back in 2003, he had no way of knowing just how successful and pervasive ASCII-ised Arabic would become. Not only has it survived the introduction of technologies that now support the Arabic language, but it has thrived.

“Students could write in Arabic now, but I still find lots who continue to type in Roman script. In theory, the technical reasons for using ASCII-ised Arabic have disappeared, but the fact that it has survived shows there must be other reasons for its use.”

Palfreyman believes that ASCII-ised Arabic is not only an important expression of youth culture but that its use of Arabic, English and Roman characters also allows it to act as an identity marker that simultaneously references global, non-Arabic norms. It also gives a voice to the very local Emirati dialect.

“In Emirati Arabic there is a ‘ch’ sound in words like ‘kitabitch’. It’s the feminine form of ‘your book’,” the linguist explains. “In standard Arabic, the same word would be ‘kitabuk’. There’s no normative way in the Arabic script … to write ‘ch’, whereas English has an accepted way of writing that sound. The use of the English ‘ch’ allowed the student in my study to write in the way that she spoke.”

Palfreyman also believes ASCII-ised Arabic contributes to literacy by encouraging reading and writing, but admits he takes an optimistic view of an issue that has become something of a moral panic throughout the Middle East. Instead, there is a widespread and growing perception that classical and modern standard Arabic – the official language of government, news and the Quran – are in a state of crisis.

An increasing number of column inches have been dedicated to the apparent rejection of standard Arabic by the younger generation, while concerned parents have added fuel to the debate by voicing their concerns about the standard of Arabic teaching and the seeming inability of their children to master even basic Arabic skills. Their fears appeared to be confirmed by the findings of a recent report, issued by Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority, which showed that over the last five years, students in the emirate’s private schools had shown little or no improvement in the language.

Educational experts may identify outdated teaching methods and a reliance on rote learning as reasons for the current malaise, but there is also a widespread perception that the increasing use of English in schools and the popularity of Arabish are also to blame.

“Arabish started with our generation, but it has passed on to the next and now it is even worse,” bemoans Jaber Mohammad, a 35-year-old businessman from Dubai. “We did our 12 years of schooling with normal Arabic and never used Arabish until we were in college, but now the younger generation start using it when they are in school,” he explains. “I see it with my cousins and my nephews – they all use Arabish – I doubt they even have Arabic installed on their mobile phones.”

Mohammad has a long history of promoting the use of the Arabic language and Arabic content online. In 1997, he helped to develop an early Arabic chat room that provided users with an on-screen Arabic keyboard that allowed them to type with their mouse. Since then, he has helped to develop Arabic literacy, football and medical websites and his latest project is tajseed.net, a not-for-profit initiative that seeks to promote the development of Arabic infographics. He is alarmed and mystified by the enduring popularity of Arabish, but is clear about the scale and the nature of its threat.

“Lots of companies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi might not care if you can’t speak proper Arabic, but you might not get the job if you can’t speak proper English. We’ll end up with a generation who aren’t even linked to their own language and Arabish isn’t helping. It used to make sense back at the time, but not any more.”

Omar Al Hameli is one Emirati who is determined not to lose his relationship with the language he describes as his mother tongue. The 25-year-old insists on using Arabic in all forms of written communication and thinks that it is “ridiculous to talk with other Arabic guys in English.” He readily admits however, that this marks him out as unusual among his family, colleagues and friends.

“I am the only one of my friends who is like this. Some use the mixed language, but some use only English and when they try to type in Arabic I always find lots of mistakes. Sometimes I poke fun at them and tell them that they should use their own language.”

For Al Hameli, an environmental science student at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, the correct use of Arabic is central to his sense of self.

“I hate it when somebody messes with Arabic because I love this language. It is part of my identity. The Quran is in Arabic and I am an Arab and a Muslim. I would love to do my Master’s in Arabic because I want to learn more about the language and I want to understand the holy book.”

Salem Al Qassimi has rather a different perspective on Arabish, and is used to having to defend his views. “People have criticised me for advocating this way of writing, but I have never said that Arabish is good or bad.”

The 30-year-old designer and founder of the Fikra Design Studio in Sharjah started researching the cultural significance of Arabish and its impact on Emirati identity while studying as a postgraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design. Language is also central to his sense of identity, but bilingualism was something with which Al Qassimi has grown up.

“I went to an American school, an American university, and I was trained as a designer in English. There are certain design terms that are difficult to translate into Arabic, so I use English when I talk about design. At home with my family and friends however, I use Arabic, and if I am speaking about religion, there is no way I can translate that into English because Arabic is the language of Islam.”

For Al Qassimi, Arabish is something more than a matter of emails and text messages, it is a concept that has become central to his design practice and his whole way of life. Right or wrong, Arabish is a cultural reality that cannot and should not be ignored.

“Right now, I feel that we live in a hybrid culture and Arabish is a philosophy about the merging of cultures. The way we dress, the cars we drive, the lifestyle we carry, all of those confirm Arabish as a fact.”

The cultural and linguistic hybridity of Arabish is something that Al Qassimi investigates through graphic design, typography and film, media that come together in projects such as Typographic Hybrids in the City, an animation that sees Arabic letters and their Roman replacements fly across the cityscape of Dubai, set to a soundtrack that mixes classical Arabic oud music with modern electronica. In Hybrid Dress, Al Qassimi created a series of posters that overlaid a kandura, the traditional clothing of Emirati men, with Western shirts and jeans and the words “Arab” in Arabic, and “Western” in English.

Rather than trying to resist the kind of cultural change that Arabish represents, Al Qassimi believes that it should be embraced, not only because it is inevitable, but because it also denotes an openness and a vitality in contemporary Emirati culture that he believes are necessary and that should be encouraged.

“To identify Emirati culture today as something that it was 50 years ago is incorrect. We are creating our own culture and a new identity right now by taking the identity we had previously and building on it, but if we restrict ourselves by not absorbing or taking things from other cultures, then our culture will become stagnant.”

“Will English affect our local, colloquial Emirati Arabic? For sure. Is it going to affect formal, classical Arabic? Not so much, because that is the Arabic of the Quran and we will always go back to that. It is the biggest protector of Arabic that we have.”

If the use of hybrid text and language has assumed the status of a moral panic in discussions about the fate of the Arabic language – a term used by sociologists to describe phenomena that are perceived as threats to cultural values and social order – there are Arabs who are campaigning for a brighter future for written and printed Arabic.

The Lebanese designer, academic, and writer Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares is one of these. As the founding creative director of the Khatt Foundation, a largely virtual cultural organisation and network of experts, designers, and researchers, Smitshuijzen AbiFares has been responsible for organising a series conferences, exhibitions, books and workshops dedicated to improving the quality of contemporary Arabic typographic design.

Her vision is nothing less than the regeneration and the renewal of Arabic visual culture – something that she currently defines as “poor” – and her aim is to achieve this using the medium of Arabic type. “Our main goal is to talk about a constant rejuvenation of the culture through typography” she explains.

“It’s important that we look at our script. In Arab culture, two of the highest forms of art we have are calligraphy and poetry, but we no longer see these in our public spaces and our cities. That is a loss.”

Smitshuijzen AbiFares has been in Dubai for the last nine days, coordinating a series of daily, nine-hour-long practical workshops in Arabic calligraphy and font design. Despite its gruelling workload, the course, the third of its kind to be held at the Tashkeel studios in Nad Al Sheba, has succeeded in attracting a dedicated band of delegates from across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe and the United States.

The quality of tutors, internationally recognised luminaries such as the Syrian calligrapher Mounir Al-Shaarani and the specialist Arabic type designer Lara Assouad Khoury attract some. Others are drawn by the prospect of producing their own unique digital font, no small matter in a world where the number of Roman fonts outnumber their Arabic counterparts by more than 100 to one. The course’s biggest pull however, is its rarity, as Smitshuijze AbiFares explains.

“Arabic type design has not been properly covered in design education, especially in the UAE. There are graphic design courses, there are typography courses, but Arabic specific courses are lacking. Even elsewhere in the world, these kind of courses are not widely spread.”

“We need these courses in the Middle East because we do not have enough well-crafted, good quality Arabic typefaces. I have a class full of Arabs, but every one of them speaks a different Arabic. That should also be seen in the way they design.”

For Smitshuijzen AbiFares however, the main obstacles to the cultural rejuvenation she seeks are not only a lack of knowledge and expertise but something more profound, an over-protectiveness of Arabic that stems from a lack of self-confidence among Arabs.

“There’s a sense that we do not know how to define ourselves because everybody tears you in different directions. If you try to do something new, everybody automatically labels it as Western, but if you do something traditional, it doesn’t quite relate because you’re dealing with something that comes from a thousand years away.”

For Smitshuijzen AbiFares, the success of the Khatt Foundation’s project relies on the development of tools that will enable designers working in Arabic to develop a contemporary and authentic voice of their own, independent of Western firms, commercial concerns, and unfettered by what she sees as a widespread tendency to constantly revisit and refine things from the past.

“There’s a misunderstanding that being contemporary is not being Arab,” she explains. “I don’t believe we should shut other cultures out, not at all, but instead of just absorbing everything that comes from abroad, just because it comes from Europe, [that] is a bit strange … Our culture is not dead and I don’t believe we need to preserve it, but to evolve it and to nurture innovation. That is the best way to ensure our culture goes on.”

This article originally appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi

 

 

Art: Sharjah Biennial 13 – Tamawuj Act II

Barely able to control the emotion in her voice, Christine Tohmé addressed the international audience that had gathered for Upon a Shifting Plate, the fourth and final off-site project of Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj, which opened in Beirut on Saturday.

“As long as the geopolitical situation is tense, art and culture are suffering because people do not think they are priorities,” the curator explained, as she stood in the old warehouse that is now headquarters of The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan, which she also directs. “This is a vulnerable time, but we need to go on working because this is the only place where multiplicity and plurality are at work in the Arab world.”

Tohmé’s sense of urgency and commitment to those values can be seen in the programme she has developed, not just for the off-site – two days of talks and culinary performances, lectures, screenings and exhibitions – but for the second and final act of this year’s Sharjah Biennial (SB13), which concludes not in the UAE but in Beirut.

Alongside a week-long roster of exhibitions, talks, film screenings, performances and book launches, the Biennial’s main events consist of two exhibitions, both of which run until the new year. Exhibited at the Beirut Art Centre, Hicham Khalidi’s An Unpredictable Expression of Human Potential includes works that take a profoundly local look at an international phenomenon: the experience of young people and their daily encounters with the state, violence, racism and exclusion. Reflecting on locations as disparate as Athens and Algiers, Casablanca and Paris, Basildon and Beirut, the show includes films such as Eric Baudelaire’s Also Known As Jihadi (2017), which follows a young man’s journey from the French suburbs to Syria and back again, and eventually to incarceration.

Video still from The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun, by Anton Vidokle (2015), at Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj, Act II Anton Vidokle. Courtesy Anton Vidokle

Based on real events and the evidence provided in judicial documents, the film examines the landscapes, both urban and rural, that the man experiences on his journey. It also asks how these reflect the social and political forces that led to his alienation, radicalisation and return.

Downtown, the Sursock Museum is hosting the Reem Fadda-curated Fruit of Sleep, which features major existing works alongside new commissions. It picks up on the theme of dormancy that was explored by Zeynep Öz in BAHAR, the SB13 off-site that took place in Istanbul in June.

Started last year, Forensic Architecture’s Ground Truth is an on­going project that uses as combination of aerial photography and digital mapping technologies to provide historical, legal and material evidence of a Bedouin presence in a series of villages that sit on the edge of Palestine’s Naqab Desert. One of these has been demolished more than 116 times in 60 years by the Israeli government.

One of seven works commissioned specially for SB13, Haitham Ennasr’s A New City: On Disciplines of Love and Capitalism uses virtual reality to take visitors on a journey through Beirut’s multilayered history. It asks how archaeologists and historians of the future are likely to interpret the wreckage left from the city’s current wave of development.

As SB13 Act II shows, Christine Tohmé’s approach has been to test the biennial format and to push it to its limits, reaching out to different locations across the wider region with off-sites in Dakar, Istanbul, Ramallah and Beirut, addressing local audiences and international issues.

If Tohmé’s aim was to support and nurture regional artistic talent, it has also projected SAF’s presence and patronage, promoting both the Biennial and the organisation as an innovative enabler whose presence can now be felt internationally and at the community level.

In the way that previous off-sites had been organised around themes of water, crops and earth, Upon a Shifting Plate focused on food and used talks, panel discussions and performances to explore the culinary sphere.

As Tohmé explained in her written introduction, “the culinary is always plural, always social. It is a space for trying things out,” which for the off-site meant talks such as Reflections on the Language of Food by the Egyptian poet Iman Mersal. This looked at rhetoric employed in popular Egyptian TV cooking programmes, while A Taste of Crime was an investigation of domestic violence in Egypt by Lebanese-Egyptian writer Sahar Mandour.

Candidly, the team from the ecologically focused design consultancy Spurse admitted that they were not trying to make food that tastes good, but to encourage their audiences to experience things differently. Their aim was to generate what they described as an intellectual and philosophical hunger among their audience. What this meant for the 60 confused participants who agreed to sit for Spurse’s experimental dinner, Eating into Future-Past Cosmologies – Tasting the Future, was a 26-course tasting menu that was designed to take diners on a sensory journey through the Lebanese landscape.

The result was a “meal” that included inedible but purified river mud; seawater; beach pebbles and rocks; just-about-edible fish bones; wild plums; cactus fruit and pickled watercress – all of which were tasted in the name of environmental awareness and critical engagement with the many issues facing our landscapes.

Still Life by Ali Cherri (2017). Courtesy of Ali Cherri and Galerie Imane Farès.

Meanwhile, essentially privileged and largely western approaches to food, such as urban foraging and dumpster diving – the practice of eating the wasted food that restaurants and supermarkets throw away each day – came under attack in Deepa Bhasthi’s presentation, The Day After. For the co-founder of India’s Forager Collective, such practices were dismissed, short-sightedly, as being the affected habits of privileged hipsters.

If food is a form of practice and performance in its own right, a form of expression and communication and a realm where experimentation and alternatives are played out on a daily basis, then this was expressed most locally and lyrically by the Lebanese academic Tarek El-Ariss.

In The Ties That Bind, the associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College combined his own family history with that of Beirut and the fortunes of mfattqa, a traditional and once beloved dish made from tahini, sugar, rice and pine nuts. The delicacy is fast disappearing, largely because it takes hours of torturous preparation, soaking and stirring.

“If you really craved mfattqa, you had to work for it,” El-Ariss explained. “The dish was a kind of ritual in the house that everyone had to take part in.”

For El-Ariss, mfattqa not only offers insights into Beirut’s history, but also offers up different and more psychoanalytic and literary ways of thinking about community and freedom, which originate from deep within the Beiruti psyche and the unconsciousness of the city.

“What does mfattqa mean? It literally means ‘the ripped one’. In Arabic, ‘to rip’ emerges from the root f-t-q,” said El-Ariss, explaining that in continental philosophy and literary theory, the notion of something that is ripped goes straight to the heart of notions of identity, both personal and collective. “So there is something in mfattqa that is literally about unmaking and about ripping and making. But in Beiruti Arabic, it also means to crave… [but] it is not any craving, it is a craving that comes at great price.”

Although mfattqa’s origins are obscure, it is believed that the dish was originally made to commemorate the story of the Old Testament prophet Job, or Ayyoub as he appears in the Islamic tradition.

Famous for the trials he went through in order to prove his faithfulness to God, Ayyoub is the embodiment of the suffering that is central to all monotheistic religions. “It’s about a bet between Satan and God, about the extent to which Job loves God and believes in him unconditionally,” the academic told his audience.

Mfattqa is traditionally served as part of Job’s Wednesday – Arba‘t Ayyoub, a celebration that is held in Beirut on the last Wednesday in April, because it is thought that Ayyoub swam and was healed of his leprosy off the coastline of Beirut. “So this means that Beirut is a city that is dedicated to the most sadomasochistic episode in the Old Testament,” explained El-Ariss. “But of course, I later discovered that almost every Mediterranean city has the same version.”

The question for the academic is whether Beirutis have given up on these binding rituals altogether, and whether they might not contain lessons for contemporary society, faced as it is with the return of political forces and regimes that are increasingly behaving as if the project of the Enlightenment had never existed.

“Have we replaced the tempting of Job by Satan with the regional powers that exist today? Have we replaced Jehova with some tyrant to the North or the South?” he asked. “Is there some leftover that continues to pull us down, but which also ties us together?”

For El-Ariss, food, and mfattqa in particular, offers an alternative metaphor for thinking about community. Not the industrial age, melting pot metaphor that once characterised North American multiculturalism. Instead, a distinctly Levantine version that allows for the continued existence of individual identities while bringing people together with rituals that bind them, but also offer alternatives. “Mfattqa is not based on a total unity of its ingredients, there is something that remains other, that remains separate, that is central to the dish itself. It doesn’t reduce products and identities; they are always ripped,” he explained.

That rupture offers El-Ariss the opportunity to move beyond Orientalist notions that the peoples of the region are trapped in an endless cycle of repetition, while offering an alternative to Western notions of modernity, identity and the nation state.

It might not have been art, but through food, the academic arrived at a way of thinking about community and citizenship that harmonises, while still allowing for plurality and difference. El-Ariss’s position may not promise an end to the region’s trials, but it does propose a tantalising change in consciousness; one rooted in the potential for liberation found in shared histories and experiences – the ties that bind.

This article originally appeared in The National

Art: Hassan Sharif – I am the Single Work Artist

Curated by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, Sharjah Art Foundation’s landmark retrospective show charts the career of the UAE’s most influential artist

In 1985, a crowd gathered outside Sharjah’s Blue Souq to inspect a series of everyday objects that had been left on the pavement, an unassuming tableau that might have been rubbish if it wasn’t for the obvious care with which it had been arranged.

As they stood and stared at the four plastic water bottles, the two lines of stuffed and knotted plastic bags and painted panels that looked like oversized crossword puzzles, some smiled; some looked to others for a clue as to what was going on; others simply stared, cross-armed, waiting for something to happen.

What the crowd probably didn’t realise was that they were witnessing Sharjah’s first contemporary art exhibition to be held in a public open space, an event that is now relatively commonplace thanks to the work of the Sharjah Art Foundation and Biennial, but was totally revolutionary at the time.

Hassan Sharif at work in his studio, the contents of which have been donated to the Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation/ Estate of Hassan Sharif

The man responsible captured the crowd’s wry smiles and bemused expressions in a series of photographs that can now be seen alongside the original chequerboard panels and some newer Masafi water bottles in the new exhibition that bears his name.

Containing almost 300 works, Hassan Sharif: I Am The Single Work Artist charts the artist’s career from 1973 to 2016, and opened at the Sharjah Art Foundation on Saturday.

Curated by the SAF’s president and director Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the show stretches across all of the foundation’s exhibition spaces, a biennial-sized tribute to the most influential and important artist the UAE has ever produced.

He died, to the shock of the art world, at the age of 65 in September last year.

“More people are starting to appreciate Hassan Sharif’s work now, more museums are interested, but I feel that it should be seen in the context of the local – and that’s why it was important that this should be the biggest show of his work,” the curator says. “When we tour this show, we won’t be able to tour at this scale. It will have to be smaller, but that doesn’t really matter.

“This scale is important locally so that local people and a lot of people who knew Hassan and his work can see it and appreciate where he went with his career – and for me, that was very important.”

As a young artist who grew up in Sharjah attending the organisations and events that Sharif helped to establish, Sheikha Hoor readily admits that it was an honour to curate a show that she began planning several years ago, in collaboration with the artist.

“We actually started working on the exhibition with Hassan, but the scale of the exhibition grew after he passed away, and after looking through nearly 4000 of his works, it became very difficult to explain the career of such a prolific artist with a small exhibition,” Sheikha Hoor says.

A pioneering artist, critic, writer and educator, Sharif not only created his own work, but also served as an inspiration to others. He exerted a gravitational force on a community of artists, writers, filmmakers and poets that spanned generations, who would gather at his ramshackle house in Satwa.

Sharif helped to dispel the myth that there was no such thing as a contemporary and critical art scene operating in the Emirates, and his work, along with that of his contemporaries Mohammed Kazem, Hussain Sharif and Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, began to be exhibited internationally from the late 1980s onwards.

As well as establishing influential organisations in Sharjah such as the Emirates Fine Art Society and Al Mureijah Art Atelier, Sharif also founded an art atelier in his native Dubai and The Flying House. A gallery space and archive organised by Hassan’s elder brother, Abdulraheem, The Flying House was dedicated to the promotion of artists working in the UAE, and now serves as Sharif’s archive and estate.

“Art covered every surface of the house – the doors, windows, steps, walls, and trees,” wrote Maya Allison, the founding director and chief curator of the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, in the book that accompanied her show, But We Cannot See Them: Tracing a UAE Art Community 1988-2008.

“The house was also an experiment in form; it sustained a collection and housed an exhibition, but it was not a gallery, nor was it a foundation. But now curators could locate and see their work year round: they were on the map.”

For Sheikha Hoor, cementing the reputation of an artist whose work is already in the collections of major museums such as the Centre Pompidou and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is one of the key objectives of her show.

Colors, 2016. Cotton rope, acrylic paint, and copper wire. 240 x 535 x 10 cm in. Courtesy of Hassan Sharif Estate. Willy Lowry / The National

“Hassan deserves to be in the history books with a lot of great artists, but for that to happen, people need to see the breadth of his work and how he used to think in terms of conceptual art,” the curator says.

“He was doing the same things that other artists of his time were doing – Yoko Ono and Joseph Kosuth – and he really was an artist on that level, he just happened to be from the UAE, and that’s why he hasn’t received the same level of recognition.”

To help with the selection of works, Sheikha Hoor turned to Sharif even after his death, using the artists’ words, concepts, titles and classifications to organise the show, which groups the works conceptually and according to their theme.

As a result, the exhibition has sections dedicated to Sharif’s studio, performances, drawings, objects and colour.

Some of the earliest works featured include Sharif’s newspaper caricatures and comic strips from the early 1970s, which he produced before he left the UAE for art college in the United Kingdom, an experience that resulted in a radical shift in the artist’s practice towards the experimentation and conceptualism that would define his later career.

Dating mainly from the 1980s, Sharif’s semi-systems reveal his fascination with self-imposed rules, repetitions and playful procedures, many of which resulted in drawings or performances that were captured on camera and are displayed in …So I created a semi-system.

“… So I created a semi-system comes from a longer quote,” Sheikha Hoor says, remembering Sharif’s words. “’I am not a systematic person. If somebody tells me this isn’t a system, I’ll say: ‘This isn’t a system, it’s a semi-system.’”

Another quote illustrates Sharif’s sense of humour and inherent playfulness.

“He said: ‘I am just a man from the East who heard there was a system and liked it.’ And I think that kind of playfulness of him talking about his work is really important,” Sheikha Hoor says.

“I want that to come through in the show more than my words. I put the show together, but it’s his work and they are his words shining through.”

Hassan Sharif in 1981. Courtesy of Hassan Sharif Estate

Those words include the show’s subtitle, I Am a Single Work Artist, which is taken from one of Sharif’s many texts in which he says that an artist only ever really makes one work throughout their whole career.

Nowhere is the shining quality of this work more evident than in the galleries dedicated to what Sharif once described as his “loyalty to colour”; beautifully-lit rooms whose paintings and assemblages – of common combs, slippers, zippers and towels – sing against the galleries’ white walls, with a ready-made nature that attests to the influence of Marcel Duchamp.

“When I was looking at Hassan’s works I kept seeing the names of colours as titles – French ultramarine, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow – and so I knew it needed its own dedicated space, but the big challenge was not to make the room too colourful.

Hassan Sharif, Combs, 2016. Copper wire, hair combs, 275 x 200 x 70 cm. Courtesy of Hassan Sharif Estate

“I had to take works out because it was visually too much, my eyes were hurting,” says Sheikha Hoor, who like Sharif went to London to study art and even had one of the same tutors as the artist, Jean Fisher, who taught Sheikha Hoor when she was studying at the Royal College of Art.

“There’s a lot of similarities between the way we were both influenced by our time at art school.

“Hassan went to the UK and then came back and felt that he had to make a change to the arts scene, so he set up the Emirates Fine Art Society and other things. I felt the same thing when I went to study in the UK and came back to work on the Biennial.”

After curating major exhibitions for 15 years, such as the Biennial and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: Two Suns in a Sunset (which was exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the 2015 UAE National Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, as well as in Sharjah), Hassan Sharif: I Am The Single Work Artist feels like a turning point for Sheikha Hoor and the Sharjah Art Foundation as a whole.

 

In January, the SAF will publish its first monograph, dedicated to Sharif, and work is currently under way to develop more exhibition spaces that will allow the foundation to have its permanent collection, library and archives on display. These will include a permanent room dedicated to the artist that will house the contents of his studio, which has been donated to the SAF by Hassan Sharif’s estate.

“Hassan loved the idea of people being curious about his work,” Sheikha Hoor says. “He wanted them to come and ask questions – that was the whole point, to create an interest within people.

“It’s important for future generations to see artists who were brave enough to do things even though society wasn’t always supportive.”

This article originally appeared in The National

Art: Ali Cherri’s The Digger

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In 2014, Ali Cherri set off on a journey into Sharjah’s desert interior, his mind preoccupied by post-apocalyptic thoughts.

The Lebanese artist was scouting for locations for his latest project, a docu-essay that would form a companion piece to his Beirut-based film The Disquiet (2013).

The result was The Digger (2015), a 24-minute film that receives its Dubai debut tonight as part of Cinema Akil and Alserkal Avenue’s new summer film season, A Hard Day’s Night.

The Disquiet explored the effect of an earthquake, a catastrophe that Cherri deployed as a metaphor for the profound crisis facing his home and the wider Middle East, and in his 2014 search for locations the filmmaker was looking for landscapes that contained traces of civilisations that had long since disappeared.

“If catastrophe is already happening and is inevitable,” Cherri asks,“then how can we survive that catastrophe?”

For the rest of this story, please visit The National

All images are stills from The Digger (2015) 24 minutes – courtesy Ali Cherri and Galerie Imane Farès.

 

My kind of place: Sharjah

Sharjah may lack it’s neighbour’s gltz and glamour, but Nick Leech finds a cultured and authentic Emirate that deserves to feature on every UAE itinerary

The ‘Heart of Old Sharjah’ heritage area. Image: Jamil Khan

Why Sharjah?

While it may lack the dash and dazzle of its near neighbour Dubai, visitors looking for something more than glossy malls and designer boutiques should give Sharjah the benefit of the doubt. UNESCO named Sharjah the Cultural Capital of the Arab world in 1998 and the Emirate regains the title in 2014. Not only does Sharjah have the most extensive traditional souk and old town in the UAE, it’s also home to some of the most respected museums and galleries in the region and a growing number of international exhibitions and events. These include the impressive Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, the Arabian Wildlife Centre at the Sharjah Desert Park – where visitors can see indigenous desert species such as the Arabian leopard that have all but disappeared from the wild – and the Sharjah Biennial, one of the most influential contemporary art events in the Middle East. Recent archaeological finds have proved that people have been visiting Sharjah ever since humanity first migrated out of Africa. They were obviously looking for something more than a hedonistic lost weekend.

A comfortable bed

Sharjah’s hotel scene is growing thanks to the many package tourists. Visitors from China and the former Soviet Union now use the emirate as a cost-effective base from which to explore Dubai. Despite its location at the Sharjah airport and the original designation as a business hotel, Rotana’s new Centro Sharjah is proving popular. The hotel has a masculine, contemporary interior with a small but well-equipped gym, outdoor pool, and regular shuttle service to local attractions and Dubai (www.rotana.com; 06 508 8000). A double room costs from Dh225 per night.

If you’re looking for a decent beach, try either the Radisson Blu Resort (www.radissonblu.com/resort-sharjah; 06 565 7777), where double rooms start from Dh425 per night, or the Coral Beach Resort (www.coral-international.com; 06 522 9999). A double room here costs from Dh196 per night. The Sharjah Rotana may look a little dated, but it makes up for this with excellent service and a location that is within easy walking distance of the city’s heritage area, museums and galleries (www.rotana.com; 06 563 7777). Classic double rooms cost from as little as Dh166 per night.

For a little more opulence, stay at the five-star Corniche Al Buhaira Hotel (www.hilton.com; 06 519 2031) where a double room costs from Dh350. The hotel will be joining the Hilton group at the end of this year. All prices include taxes.

Sharjah’s Arts Area with the city’s towers and art museum in the background

Find your feet

For culture vultures, there’s more than a weekend’s “edutainment” to be found in Sharjah’s carefully restored arts and heritage areas and the sites here are all within easy walking distnace of each other. These include the recently rebuilt Al Hosn Fort, home to the ruling Al Qasimi family for 200 years, the atmospheric Souq Al Arsah with its antique shops and beautiful palm-frond roof, the Bait Al Naboodah, a traditional house that used to belong to the pearl-trading Al Shamsi family, and the Bait Al Gharbi.

Located opposite the Islamic Museum, the Bait Al Gharbi is a courtyard house with three cooling wind towers and many unique architectural features. It now houses a museum of traditional life featuring furniture, jewellery, ceramics and costumes.

The area is also home to the Sharjah Art Museum, the largest art museum in the Gulf, which contains a permanent collection of more than 300 orientalist paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, which has galleries dedicated to the history of Islamic art, history, science, and culture.

Al Noor Mosque, Buhairah Corniche, Sharjah

Meet the locals

The Al Gahwa Al Shaabiya cafe (06 572 3788) is a traditional building constructed of coral, sea rocks, and gypsum that now serves as a coffee shop and late night restaurant.

The restaurant has an extensive menu of Arabic meals and snacks and is popular with Emiratis who like to gather on the large outdoor terrace.

The views of the Buhaira Corniche and Khalid Lagoon are excellent, but if you want to avoid the noise of seemingly constant traffic, make sure to sit inside.

Book a table

Sadaf is an Iranian restaurant that’s popular with local Emirati families and expats alike. It has an atmospheric interior that’s decorated with traditional Persian tiles, private dining booths, and an open tandoor from where the smell of fresh bread fills the restaurant. Among the popular dishes is the traditional Iranian chelo kabab sultani, a veal and minced meat dish served with rice (www.sadaffood.com; 06 5693344).

Sharjah’s date market, Amy Leang, The National

Shopper’s paradise

Given that Dubai is so close, coming to Sharjah to shop in a mall rather misses the point, but Sharjah’s Blue Souq still manages to hold its own. Packed with small shops and stalls selling everything from Iranian carpets and Bedouin jewellery, to plastic flowers, electronics and toys, this is a modern mall at its most souq-like. It’s also one of the most popular spots for an evening’s promenade.

What to avoid

Sharjah’s traffic is legendary and a journey that might take 20 minutes during the day can take hours in rush hour.

Don’t miss

Sharjah’s traditional markets and old souq are unlike anything else in the UAE. Genuine antiques and bric-a-brac can be found in the Souq Al Arsah while the cooling colonnades of the vegetable market offer soothing respite from the noise and mayhem beyond.

Traders at the traditional date market, behind the bus station, offer shoppers free samples as well as the opportunity to practise haggling, while the small but teeming plant souq has greenery for your house and garden. As the bedding display on one of the city’s many roundabouts says, “Smile, you’re in Sharjah”.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi