Middle East crisis?

United Arab Emirates launches major moment in the art. The fair Art Dubai has an international profile while Biennale in Sharjah offers a sharper picture of contemporary art in the Middle East.

It is a crisis in the United Arab Emirates it’s said, but that’s not so obvious at the art fair Art Dubai, when for the third time looking up the gates of luxurious conference center Madina Jumeirah in Dubai.
Or is it just what it does. Fair enough, it must mean something when the first Monday falls into is a sponsor exhibition actually fragile most of the galleries have been at the fair. French Jeweleryfirm Van Cleef & Arpels presents a gloomy, labyrinthine treasure full of international crown jewels - glittering diamond brooches, precious stones decorated antiloparmband with more advanced lullull, which often proves to have been in the Princess Grace or otherwise removed in each BIG GAME.

Crisis, what crisis? It feels like a mantra, as a moment of escape from a reality where crash diving oil and property prices has been the recently exploding art market that some bags together, and quickly transformed Dubai from one of the world's richest cities to one of the deepest in debt.

And given how it works: Art Dubai this year is a fairly cozy exhibition, where the non-commercial parts including a nyinstiftat art prize, a fighting spirit Palestinian special section and an experimental video frames in the exhibition floor might Century overwhelming international galleries custom content of their stands to the regional clientele. Only a tenth are from the Middle East, which means that it is hardly at the Art Dubai to meet the local art scene. It does so in such cases, better options on the Fair Bastakiya, where a large number of galleries not only from Dubai but from all over the region crowd together on the narrow streets of the old city center.

But the sharpest image of the contemporary art scene in the Middle East may be as usual at the Biennale in the neighboring Emirate of Sharjah. This year's exhibition, the ninth, is a step in the right direction compared to 2007, when the curator's opportunistic attempt to jump on the climate debate was the whole occasion to feel deceitful. The green rhetoric that has become increasingly common at official level change hardly that Arab Emirates and hence Sharjabiennalens economy, after all, entirely dependent on both their own and others' carbon dioxide emissions.

The kind of inflated self-contradictions, thus eliminating the need for this year's biennial, which in general seems to be made in the review evidence. The theme is "Provisions for a future", and the exhibition tentative, reflective tone leaves plenty of room for the individual artist's estate, which nearly all are represented with two or more works. Just a simple fact, a fairly radical break with the standard biennial format.

What is at stake here is the strange way of thinking can be an important resource in a world that certainly is a huge need of new thought patterns. Vague, sure, and the concrete it will be about a little anything. For example, to remedy a historical loss, such as Japan Hiroyuki Masuyama do with their meticulous photographic reconstructions of some missing paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. Or, as the Indian Sheela Gowda, to build a model of how the language distinguishes and unites. Her installation, where visitors are fascinated and listening to a distant murmur of a straggly collection of interconnected water pipes, belonging to the Biennale finest works.

But of course there is also a political dimension to this challenging new light paths. Biennale acquisition under its Director Hoor Al Qasimi 'children in Gaza "and among the artists from the Arab world, the region's conflict and såriga history course at present.

For me taking Biennale end in that I see myself disappear without trace from a surveillance monitor in Lebanon Lamia Joreiges black, interactive maze where manipulated night cameras and speed footage from Tarkovskijs "Solaris" helps create a sense of both vulnerability and unreality.
I will think of the tunnels in Gaza, as the eerie and inescapable pendang to over attack in Van Cleef & Arpels glitter labyrinth at the fair. An unusually worthy conclusion to an unusually strong biennial.


/Alexander Engzell