Abu Dhabi Art goes free (and into the metaverse)

For the first time Abu Dhabi Art has announced that entry to the art fair will be free of charge for all visitors. In past years there’s been a small charge (around AED 30) though to be fair it was never too difficult to find a complimentary ticket from somewhere.

Pre-registration through the dedicated website is recommended.

Ticketless access does send a good message, however. Abu Dhabi Art’s PR says this highlights an “ongoing commitment to nurturing and supporting the local arts and culture scene”; in truth though it’s been made possible by the largesse of a newly appointed co-lead fair sponsor for 2022, the Swiss luxury watches and jewellery house Charles Zuber.

Charles Zuber is actually being launched “exclusively” at Abu Dhabi Art this year, with a show new works by fine art and NFT photographer Lara Zankoul. Mohamed Hilal Group, Abu Dhabi Art’s other co-lead sponsor, will concurrently be promoting luxury perfume brand Hind Al Oud by inviting visitors to discover an “immersive perfume experience”.

Dyala Nusseibeh, Abu Dhabi Art’s director, said free access to the fair has long been an ambition of the team – “providing an opportunity for a wide audience to engage with the cultural programming that the art fair has to offer, whilst maintaining our commercial DNA as a space for the sale and acquisition of artworks”.

There should be a good deal of opportunity for that: this is will be the largest Abu Dhabi Art to date, with 80 galleries from 28 countries (33 of those galleries are new to Abu Dhabi). They include invited galleries and artists under the aegis of Abu Dhabi Art’s guest curators Rachida Triki, Jade Yeşim Turanlı and Riccarda Mandrini.

Another guest curator is Abed Al Kadiri, multidisciplinary artist and director of the specialist Lebanon-based art book publisher Dongola Limited Editions. He’s been curating the Beyond: Emerging Artists programme, mentoring three UAE-based emerging artists – Majd Alloush, Sarah Al Mehairi and Mohamed Khalid – as they create new commissioned works to be seen at Abu Dhabi Art. Their theme is explorations of the notions of borders, home, man-made territories, and geographical mapping, with a special focus on artists’ books. That should be interesting.

Incidentally Al Kadiri’s acclaimed pandemic undertaking Cities Under Quarantine: The Mailbox Project will be on view at Qasr Al Muwaiji in Al Ain from 16 November, coinciding with the opening of the fair.

Into the metaverse

The 2022 fair’s 2022 Gateway exhibition, another guest-curator project, which will be on display at Manarat Al Saadiyat from 16 November to 22 January. We think it could be one of the big hits of this year’s Abu Dhabi Art.

Under the zeitgeisty title My Life in the Metaverse, it runs until 22nd January. The curator is Omar Kholeif, who among many other things is currently Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation and has been a past guest curator for Abu Dhabi Art’s Focus gallery section (from 2017 to 2019).

That augers well; Dr Kholeif has always been an interesting curator. His show aims to explore the aesthetics of digital culture – “inclusive of debates around NFTs and blockchain technologies, but also different histories and narratives … whilst expanding Abu Dhabi’s contribution to debates around emerging technology,” as Dyala Nusseibeh put it.

Omar Kholeif himself calls the exhibition “a playful interplay of fact, fiction, and fantasy” resulting from nearly two decades of research and experience. “My Life in the Metaverse hopes to elucidate the possibilities of the free-wheeling techno-present. Critically reflecting on the myriad histories that have brought us to this moment is no small task; accordingly, this show is conceived as the first chapter in a series of projects that explore the prospects of our collective imagination.”

The show itself spans a variety of media, of course, including sculpture, painting, photography, installation, video, and NFTs, with a journey through a simulation under the guidance of Dr Kholeif’s alter ego Dr O. Curated from Dr O’s desktop, it offers “a gateway into all things ‘meta’, from the rise of Web3, NFTs and renewable energy, to Photoshop aesthetics and AI”.

The works there include some new commissions and others that have never been shown in the UAE before. Among the artists are soke top names, including Sophia Al Maria, Cory Arcangel, Celia Hempton, Paul Heyer, Haroon Mirza, Farhad Moshiri, and Heather Phillipson (the current Turner-Prize nominee helped to come up with the idea for the exhibition).

Also there: new NFT paintings from Simon Denny’s Dotcom Séance project, Trevor Paglen’s The Standard Head, Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha (1974-2002 – a Buddha statue watching an image of itself on a TV screen on an infinite loop), and a series of Andy Warhol polaroids. Art collective Cream Projects will show a new commission, Too Many Humans (2022-ongoing), part of a treatise on image-making in an age that has been reconceived by corporations as the “metaverse”.

The exhibition begins and ends with a propositional concept store entitled Dr O’s Pop Shop: The Blockchain Edition. Inspired by Keith Haring’s Pop Shops of the 1980s, it aims for an immersive retail experience to fit the present times.

In addition to the physical fair, which runs at Manarat al Saadiyat as usual from 16 to 20 November (2-9pm except for the opening day, which is 5-9pm), Abu Dhabi Art will again be offering a virtual platform. More general information is here.

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