DUBAI ART
GALLERIES IN
2020

DUBAI ART GALLERIES IN 2020

Today, the connotations to the word ‘travel’ have changed drastically. The experience that once involved Luxury has now taken a back seat. Health now leads the navigation.
Travelling to Dubai in November 2020 was not as compared to the good old days when masks had not yet become part of our attire. Nonetheless, it was inspiring and motivating to visit Art Galleries upholding physical art exhibitions like Ishara Art Foundation, Leila Heller Gallery, Custot Gallery Dubai and Green Art Gallery.

Ishara Art Foundation hosted a group show ‘Every Soiled Page’ curated by Sabih Ahmed. The exhibition was an attempt to expand the notion of bearing witness beyond human perception to the planetary dimensions of remembering. The artworks by six artists collectively reverberated the forgotten memories as an act of resistance.

Anju Dodiya, Astha Butail, Inder Salim, Neha Choksi, Praneet Soi, Sunil Padwal were the featured artists of this refreshing exhibition curated by Sabih Ahmed. ‘Every Soiled Page’ was a beautiful manifestation of inspiration drawn from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem ‘Memory’ that was written in 1953.

In Sabih’s words “It proposes art as a site for a reverse archaeology, where materials, voices, inscriptions and testimonies produce a field of resonance for bearing witness and remembering. Faiz’s verses powerfully evoke that to remember we must apprehend the soiled page, listen to the reverberations collectively, even sing with them the songs that rise with each day.”

Leila Heller Art Gallery held a solo show ‘Before the blast’ by Marwan Sahmarani. The works by the artist illustrated the jeopardy in which the country was living in the past few months leading up to the explosion in Beirut. The artist communicated through the sweeping and whirling brushstrokes and colors. The represented geometric bodies on the canvases conveyed the chaos and conflict that constituted day to day life in Lebanon. Motifs of flesh, body, and violence populated the pictorial surface and emphasised human destruction. The paintings in the exhibition expressed its political nature intertwined together with aesthetics.

Custot Gallery Dubai hosted ‘Nocturne’, displaying works by artists Koo Jeong A and Tomás Saraceno. A nocturne is a musical composition in Romanticism, not necessarily evocative of the night, but realised for the execution in the dreamlike and magical atmosphere of the night.

“We are not born disoriented, we become disoriented. In this sense we could interpret, this time, the dodecahedron clusters, the Clouds of Tomás Saraceno, as the hexagonal web formed by place and grid cells, that together in our hippocampus, answered the questions: where am I? And then where am I going?”

Green Art Gallery held a Solo Show by New York-based Iranian artist Maryam Hoseini. The canvases had a defined shape and forms, coloured in a monochromatic palette with a dominant blue-hue. The paintings were like dreamscapes which consisted of distorted animals, birds, plants, objects and human figures floating in their spaces.

“The large panels simultaneously evoke the shapes of abstracted human forms and familiar architectures, while the shadows cast against the walls highlight the theatricality and fluidity in their relationship to the viewer. One becomes strangely body-conscious encountering the work – simultaneously connecting to the human scale of the panels while being alienated by the flatness of their surfaces.”