Forgotten futures

• Last Updated: November 19. 2009 1:52PM UAE / November 19. 2009 9:52AM GMT

Paintings are archived at a restoration and storage centre in Paris administered by the French government. Stephane de Sakutin / AFP

As the cultural landmarks of an earlier era disappear from present view, Antonia Carver suggests the Gulf needs to catch archive fever.

“Of course the mid-1980s were the golden age of UAE culture,” a distinguished Emirati cinephile friend opined over a coffee recently. “That’s when our artists pushed the boundaries, when our poetry was read all over the Arab world.” I almost choked on my espresso. Even many of us well-versed in the longevity of the UAE’s cultural traditions hold the ingrained belief that the cultural explosion of the 2000s had no precedent – in part because the artefacts of these earlier movements have not been preserved for posterity. The innovative poetry journals of decades past are today languishing in private home libraries, while the poets have retired, or work in other fields; some are recognised by an older generation of Emiratis, but little of their work exists in translation and none are household names. Even the most renowned visual artist of this earlier generation, Hassan Sharif – now celebrated internationally – has yet to have a retrospective in the UAE, and there has not been a single scholarly monograph dedicated to his work.

Observers of the Gulf art scene – international and local alike – tend to date the start of the present renaissance to landmark events in recent years: to 2003, when Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi relaunched the Sharjah Biennial, or 2006, when Christie’s set up shop in Dubai, or 2007, when Abu Dhabi announced its grand plans to open international museums on Saadiyat Island. To do so is understandable, but it conflates the culmination of cultural energies with their beginnings, and takes signal moments for the art market as the equivalent of cultural and societal shifts. There is little documentation, in English at least, of the relationship between these events and other developments in the region, or the ground laid by artists, poets, filmmakers and writers between the 1970s and the 1990s – an era in which Kuwait had a thriving art market and museum plans of its own, when UAE poetry was debated across the Arab world, when Baghdad was a centre of literary culture.

As the attention of the rest of the world turned to the Middle East in the wake of September 11, 2001, so did the interest of foreign art curators and collectors. But in place of the vibrant cultural lineage of each country in the region, there emerged a “Middle Eastern Art”, on display in innumerable group shows and museum exhibits that showcased artists who lived across the region – or, more commonly, who once lived here, or whose families once did – even if their works had few common threads.

To a degree this may indicate a curatorial laziness, or simply the imperatives of marketing – since it is easier to package disparate artists under one banner than to distinguish their differences. But it is the absence of historical documentation and institutional memory that has paved the way: before there was one “Middle Eastern Art”, there were various self-contained national and local art scenes, whose significance waxed and waned over time, with ideas and artists spreading and travelling throughout the region, sometimes through the busy port cities of the Gulf.

Cultural history does not trace a linear path of progress or expansion; it tends toward a stop-start motion, in which patterns of ideas interact with other societal forces (cultural, political or economic) and appear to flock together, gather momentum and subside. Key moments ping here and there, and their significance at any given time is hard to detect, important for some and utterly unnoticed by others. It is only in hindsight that the trends and directions make themselves clear, that the stops and starts form themselves into a narrative shape. This is perhaps more true in the Gulf than anywhere else, where even the more familiar kind of history – of a social and political sort – has yet to form itself into a standard narrative outside of school textbooks. There are few books in English or Arabic that document past events, and even fewer that focus on the history of culture, let alone on single artists or artistic movements.

Even the most significant works of art, or the endeavours of groups of affiliated artists, are by their nature ephemeral. They are shown, once or twice or a dozen times, at galleries, group shows, or in biennials. Some will be purchased by private collectors, while a rare few may end up in the collections of museums. They appear and then disappear from public view – unless they become part of a continuous record of art and cultural practice that is documented, archived, and revisited. Without any effort to construct a canon – or a genealogy for the work being made today – all we can see is the present.

Every time an arts administrator arrives from abroad, cultural cringe – the phenomenon whereby an international voice somehow carries more weight than a local one – ensures that they are interviewed immediately and repeatedly about their views on culture in the Gulf. Their cautious sentences usually begin, “I’ve only been here a couple of months, but …” and, presumably encouraged by sizeable pay packets, they are then compelled to go on to list the unique things they plan to initiate – while a lack of public documentation or collective awareness obscures the fact that similar events or initiatives have already been held in years past, or in nearby locales. When these cultural practitioners leave, as many do after a few years, they take their institutional knowledge with them. Soon a new cohort of international administrators arrives to take their places, and the process repeats all over again.

What gets lost in the churn of people coming and going is not merely the memory of events and artists, but something more significant: the evolution of thinking about art and culture and society in a given place, how the conception of the country has shifted over time and been reflected in the work of artists. The shifts that are most significant, in hindsight, are those that produced a change in thinking, rather than doing. Take this year’s Venice Biennale, for instance. The UAE National Pavilion, curated by Tirdad Zolghadr, attempted to cast a quizzical eye over the UAE, to foreground concepts and artists whose work attempted an see beyond the “permanent present” of the boom years.

Together with the Adach Platform for Venice exhibition, the UAE looked inward, in public, for the first time. Artists such as Lamya Gargash, Hassan Sharif, Tarek Al Ghoussein, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Huda Saeed Saif and Mohamed Kazem attempted to reconnect with a recent past, to get under the skin of their society and their place in it. Their artistic explorations reminded us of the particular, invaluable space artists can occupy when it comes to memory and history: rather than attempt to contain it, gain control over it, they tend to embrace its slipperiness and play with it, catching the grains that slip through their fingers.

In this regard, the failure to document and record the work of artists both present and past is a loss for society at large, for it is these artists – whether filmmakers, painters or poets – who have opened up a space for debate that did not previously exist, at least not in public. An art of exploration, of ideas, can bring us closer, for example, to a discursive understanding of what gives the UAE the potential to become a society, rather than an Emirati-led hierarchical collection of different ethnicities. The art and design scene in the UAE, particularly in Dubai, may be somewhat rarefied, but it stands head and shoulders above many other sectors of society in facilitating an equal exchange of ideas between Emiratis, Iranians, expat Arabs and Europeans – unheard of in many other fields.

For this intellectual ferment to spread beyond the present moment – and outside the boundaries of the existing community of artists and writers – it must be recorded and collected, whether in the form of exhibition catalogues, scholastic monographs or artists’ own publications. This week Bidoun, the Middle Eastern art organisation of which I am a part, will premiere our first contribution to this project of excavation, a travelling library of rare books, catalogues, journals and artists’ books that aims to chronicle moments in the history of contemporary art practices in the region.

There is a need, in the UAE and across the region, to fashion a kind of institutional memory, to set the ambitious cultural developments of the future on a foundation that draws from the past. But it is not a matter of establishing an official narrative or a single authoritative history, and it must be the work of many hands. To document the variety and diversity of cultural endeavours, past and present, requires myriad voices and multiple histories, an aggregation of subjective memories and significant moments, all of which, taken together, add up to a picture of society at large.

Antonia Carver is editor-at-large of Bidoun magazine and director of its curatorial wing, Bidoun Projects. The Bidoun Library is open at Abu Dhabi Art, at Emirates Palace, until Sunday, 4-10pm each day.