Louvre Abu Dhabi and Richard Mille have announced the 10 artists shortlisted for the 2022 Richard Mille Art Prize. They will take part in the second edition of the Art Here exhibition, running from 18 November to 19 February in the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Forum; one will be announced as the winner of the 2022 Richard Mille Art Prize early in 2023 (as well as the kudos, the prize comes with a useful $60,000 in cash).
The artists are an interesting group, most of them born in or around the 1980s and all recognised names – Afra Al Dhaheri, Shaikha Al Mazrou and Zeinab Alhashemi from the UAE; Ayman Zedani, Dana Awartani and Manal AlDowayan from Saudi Arabia; Elizabeth Dorazio from Brazil and the UAE; Simrin Mehra Agarwal and Rand Abdul Jabbar from Abu Dhabi via Syria and India respectively; and Vikram Divecha – born in Beirut, raised in India, now identified with Dubai.
Indeed, they could be a seen as a viable sample of emerging-or-just-about-established artists from the region; all have had several solo exhibitions, most feature in blue-chip public collections, the majority are regular beneficiaries of commissions from biennials and invitations to participate in institutional shows.
It’s not a bad snapshot of interesting art from the region and should make for a good show, perhaps a bit more loaded towards 3D than we might expect (though that’s an assumption based on the artists’ CVs: we haven’t yet seen the work that will be at the Louvre Abu Dhabi).
Art Here 2022 invited proposals from artists residing in the UAE and GCC for current or future work (in total the jury received 246 submissions) which somehow engaged with the notions of ‘icon’ and ‘iconic’ – the artworks should explore “how the concept of the icon resonates within contemporary art practices and how it informs new artistic perspectives”.
This might appear a slightly odd choice of theme, but it obviously fits with Richard Mille’s image and the luxury watchmaker’s self-styled “iconic visual identity”.
It also seems to have produced some very strong submissions. The exhibition’s curator Reem Al Fadda said she was impressed by the work put forward by the shortlisted artists; “the exhibition will be stellar in terms of quality of production and discourse, a sentiment I am sure will be shared by our visitors and the cultural community at large. The creativity of these submissions is reflective of the strong regional artistic scene.”
The shortlist was selected by a five-member jury – Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, Chairman of UAE Unlimited, art collector, and a patron of several institutions including Sharjah Art Foundation; Morad Montazami, art historian, curator, and editor of Zamân Books; Hala Wardé, founding architect of HW Architecture, long-term partner of Jean Nouvel and the lead on the Louvre Abu Dhabi project; Dr Souraya Noujaim, Director of Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management at Louvre Abu Dhabi; and Reem Fadda, Director of Abu Dhabi’s Cultural Foundation and curator of Art Here 2022.
Access to the exhibition will be included in the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s general admission (AED 63). More information on Louvre Abu Dhabi Art Here 2022 and The Richard Mille Art Prize is here.
Afra Al Dhaheri (b.1988, UAE) works across various mediums including mixed media, sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, photography, and printmaking to draws out notions of time and adaptation, rigour and fragility. An alumna of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, she has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has had a couple of solo exhibitions but has figured strongly in many group shows including the influential Emirati Expressions exhibitions of 2011 and 2015, 2022’s Portrait of a Nation II and Zemanna, and the 2022 Beyond: Emerging Artists cohort for Abu Dhabi Art in 2020.
Ayman Zedani (b.1984, Saudi Arabia) defies strict classification in terms of his practice, which works to upend our comprehension of the past and challenge our acceptance of the future through videos, installations and immersive environments. His arc of inquiry highlights the interactions and relationships between humans and more-than-human worlds, framing his practices and projects as extended animism and highlighting humanity’s relationship to nature, especially in the regional context; his are built on a series of experiments and investigations exploring multi-species collaboration and various forms of knowledge as a foundation to overcome the challenges of the Anthropocene. Recent examples include projects for Desert X Alula (2022), Diriyah Biennale (2021); Noor Riyadh (2021); and Lahore Biennial (2020). He has a permanent installation titled Terrapolis at Expo 2020 Dubai. He won the inaugural Ithra Art Prize; his debut solo show was at Athr Gallery, Jeddah, in 2019.
Dana Awartan (b. 1987, Saudi Arabia) has a practice that ranges from painting and sculpture to performance and multimedia installation, seeking to imbue the forms, techniques, concepts, and spatial constructs that define Arab culture with a contemporary awareness. Her work often revolves around the highly codified and symbolically laden language of geometry in reference to notions of universal interconnectedness and spiritual harmony, harnessing the wisdom embedded in traditional crafts to tackle issues of gender, healing, cultural destruction, and sustainability in a constant effort to straddle continuity and innovation, aesthetic experimentation and social relevance. She has featured in several biennials (among them Diriyah, Rabat, Jakarta, Marrakech and Kochi-Muziris; her solo exhibitions include The Silence Between Us at Maraya Art Centre in2018; and her work is in several institutional collections, among them those of the Sheikh Zayed National Museum, Jameel Arts Centre, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, British Museum, and the Guggenheim.
Elizabeth Dorazio (b.1957, Brazil) works between Brazil and the UAE, and her practice draws on the visual cultures and popular techniques of both ‘homes’; she uses drawing, collage, woodwork, and installation to explore the mysteries of human relations to nature and the cosmos. While she remains faithful to a certain technical classicism (drawing, etching, the use of egg tempera), she also disrupts through material (x-ray fragments, chair caning) and scale. She has featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1987 and is currently on the MFA course at NYUAD.
Manal AlDowayan (b.1973, Saudi Arabia) has long been invested in interrogating the gender-biassed customs that impact the condition of women in Saudi Arabia. Equally at home with sound, neon, and sculpture, Al Dowayan achieved a degree of fame for the participatory installations Suspended Together (2011) and Esmi-My Name (2012), the result of workshops offering channels for thousands of women in the Kingdom to address unjust social customs; since then her work has been exhibited regionally and internationally. She has an MA in Contemporary Art Practice in Public Spheres from the Royal College of Art; she currently lives and works between London, Dhahran and Dubai.
Rand Abdul Jabbar (b.1990, Syria) uses design, sculpture and installation to examine and engage with historic, cultural and archaeological narratives, creating forms that draw on artefacts, architecture and mythology to produce fragmentary reconstructions of historic events and past experiences. A SEAF alumna, her work has been exhibited internationally as well as locally (Abu Dhabi Art, Jameel Arts Centre, NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, Warehouse421). She received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University in 2014.
Shaikha Al Mazrou (b.1988, UAE) is current fascinated with materiality in art; her works often combine mass-produced materials, such as electronic waste or construction materials, with colour and form, experimenting with these resources to create abstract geometric arrangements. Fascinated by notions of physical space, her sculptures and installations materialize as simple gestures that emphasize the representation of tension, weight and space. Among several commissions and shows in the last few years, 2022 stands out – her largest single work to date, Red Stack (2022), was shown at Frieze Sculpture in London; her two-part public commission When Mountains are Domesticated (2022) was commissioned AlUla International Airport’s executive terminal in KSA; and she had a major public art installation (Measuring Physicality of Void) at the second edition of Desert X AlUla, Saudi Arabia. Her large-scale sculpture The Plinth, 2021, is part of the Expo 2020 Public Art Programme. She has a solo show at Lawrie Shabibi opening 14 November.
Simrin Mehra Agarwal (b.1979, India) works in drawings, paintings, carvings, reliefs and sculpture; she creates complex and elaborate compositions that meticulously deconstruct even the finest of details to draw out hidden meanings and connections. Her practice is anchored in how we understand nature within the context of histories of war, neglect, and climate change. She has been exhibiting since the turn of the millennium, has exhibited widely, has received several awards and residencies, and holds a Golden Visa from Abu Dhabi for Exceptional Talent in the Visual Arts.
Vikram Divecha (b.1977 Beirut) has developed a practice around what he calls ‘found processes’ through which he raises questions about time, value and labour. His moving image works, installations, and public art projects have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Louvre Abu Dhabi and Frieze. He holds an MFA in Visual Art Columbia University and currently teaches as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at NYUAD.
Zeinab Alhashemi (b.1985, UAE), an Emirati conceptual artist who specialises in site-specific installation, has been a leading figure in the region’s contemporary art and design scene since she started exhibiting back in 2009. A commissioned artist for Sharjah Biennial 11, her permanent public artwork Takween is installed at Expo 2020 Dubai; she had work at the latest Desert X AlUla; and upcoming exhibits will be at Art D’Egypt by the Pyramids of Giza, Noor Riyadh 2022 and Misk Art Foundation.
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