The NYUAD Art Gallery usually runs no more than two or three major exhibitions each season, and it has just announced two for Spring and Fall this year.
The team there is keeping busy on other fronts this year, too, particularly by curating projects outside the country – notably for the National Pavilion UAE’s exhibit at the Venice Biennale and the UAE’s 50th anniversary exhibition at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC.
The start of March will see the opening of a show in the Abu Dhabi gallery by the hottest local artists’ collective – Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian. Originally from Iran, the three have adopted the UAE as their home; they have built an international reputation for their jointly produced projects, performances, paintings, and animations, usually immersive and often surreal.
For Parthenogenesis, their first institutional solo exhibition in the UAE, the artists are creating a landscape in the gallery that essentially summarises their practice – tracing how an artwork grows itself through an artist’s relationships with others. Parthenogenesis is a testament to their 13 years in Dubai as artists living and working together, creating a landscape and tapestry of continuously evolving ideas and dialogues with collaborators, artists, and visitors to their home.
That already sounds like yet another winner for The NYUAD Art Gallery, which hasn’t put on a dud show in its five years. The Fall 2022 exhibition also looks like a surefire hit: Khaleej Modern will be a landmark historical survey of the last century of modern art movements across the Gulf states, curated by Dr Aisha Stoby (recently announced as curator of the inaugural Oman Pavilion at the Venice Biennale) and based on her own research of art in the region from before the oil boom through to 2008.
Aisha Stoby is an art historian and curator who has published and lectured widely on modernism in the Global South, with a particular interest in modern art movements in the Arabian Peninsula. Her exhibition aims to analyse the Gulf’s modern art history as a whole for the first time, promising a wider conversation on art movements in the region.
Individual countries in the GCC have sometimes received this kind of historical attention, but mostly in terms either of traditional culture or the emergence of contemporary art in the last 50 years – not least in The Art Gallery’s own groundbreaking 2017 show But We Cannot See Them. Khaleej Modern should be an important extension to the Art Gallery’s mission of illuminating the art history of the whole Gulf.
Maya Allison, Executive Director of The Art Gallery, described Aisha Stoby’s work as groundbreaking – her research “shows that clusters of artistic communities have thrived throughout the modern Gulf, often as informal, self-supported collectives, as she will trace in Khaleej Modern. I am compelled by the depth and complexity of the work of these artists, long-recognized by their peers, but only now entering the canons of modern global art history. ”She also noted the strength of the current scene. “For our partnership with the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, both the curator, Munira Al Sayegh, and the artists she selected for their current exhibition, all thrive in the context of present-day UAE’s art scene.
Meanwhile there’s still a couple of days to catch The Art Gallery’s highly recommended current exhibition, Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection – it closes on 5 February.
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