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THE VEIL OF CHARLES
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Adeena Mey and Catherine Borra on “Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East.” LONDON: After almost four years of expectation, the Saatchi Gallery re-opened its doors to the public in October 2008 with a maybe-not-so-unexpected up-rise of young Chinese ‘fallen angels’ — “The Revolution Continues: New Art from China.”
Now, the gallery continues its adventures with “Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East,” which is prepared with the undeniable connoisseurship of associate Philips de Pury who recently appointed Sheika Lulu Al-Sabah as the company’s director of the Middle East. The opening was timed to a thematic week that was highlighted by Tate Britain’s symposium about art in the Middle East. | | |  | | Artist Wafa Hourani; Kader Attia's Ghost. | | | It can be disorienting at first sight to encounter politicized art from the likes of Wafa Hourani (Ramallah, Palestine), Shadi Ghadirian (Tehran, Iran), Tala Madani (Tehran, Iran / Amsterdam) in the gallery’s new premises in Sloan Square; its sleek Dinesen flooring is in contrast with the crudeness of some of the works. Sunny and sanitized, the space is more than impressive in its Parthenopean looks — with its 13 rooms, a Saatchi project space for emerging artists, Saatchi-online membership computer room and a schools’ art display, plus the Philips de Pury commercial gallery stationed in the same venue, it’s a miniaturized art system, and all for free. | | |  | | Adeena Mey and artist Marwan Rechmaoui; Artist Nadia Ayari. | | | But yet, the exhibition proved a wonderful meeting point for a generation of quasi-unknown artists from this new wave of Middle-Eastern art. Many of them though are already expanding in the International scene, as part of a Global society, be they Middle-Eastern or not. Nadia Ayari describes herself first of all as an artist, second as an Arab, and third as an Arab-artist — though all of the work on display reveals an ever more penetrating involvement with a local politics in conversation with western culture, something that is maybe less evident in traditional West London gallery strolls… | | |  | | Shirin Fakhim's Tehran Prostitutes; Diana Al-Hadid's The Tower of Infinite Problems. | | | The Saatchi gallery has become the shelter for an art that is migratory. Marwan Rechmaoui is a Lebanese artist who lived in Boston, the Emirates and New York, and after 10 years of roaming returned to his homeland: Beirut is in his eyes the only viable environment for intellectual and creative activity in a problematic yet also flourishing Middle East. Spectre (The Yacoubian Building, Beirut), 2006-2008 is symptomatic of such migratory movements. He constructs a replica of his apartment-block in which he lived in Beirut: after the conflict with Israel in 2006, it was evacuated and from a modernist utopia it became an over-populated shelter that turned into a demographic catastrophe. The work was selected for the São Paulo Biennial in 2006, but the model couldn't be shipped because of the ongoing conflict — so the concrete and glass structure remained in Lebanon, while the metallic skeleton was taken to Brasil by Rechmaoui himself in his personal luggage — there he replaced the structure with a more simple and lighter wooden construction. As the symbolic heaviness of the materials couldn't be transported, it reflected the impact of local conflicts upon the manifestation and distribution of intellectual ideas from the region. | | |  | | A view of Kader Attia's Ghost; Staff Member beside Barbad Golshiri's Where Spirit and Semen Met. | | So, the artists in the show are glad to have been given the possibility of finally translating their work into a new environment, and consider London as a great opportunity to divulge their discourse. Also, it is a chance to meet lots of other artists from the same region, as artist Wafa Hourani expresses. He hopes that this show will receive even more attention than the already over-popular previous show. He has been working a lot, as all of the artists — so this show came as a treat. It was nice to see people outside of their working context.
After the weekend of intense party-labor and buzz, though, all of them will be disseminated again, to Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Berlin, Paris or New York. Onwards. | | | | |  | |
A view of Beirut Caoutchouc and Marwan Rechmaoui's Spectre (the Yacoubian Building, Beirut). | | |
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