International links

Ed Lake

• Last Updated: February 02. 2009 2:16PM UAE / February 2. 2009 10:16AM GMT

The artists Fatima Saleh of Abu Dhabi and Fatma Saeed of Dubai speak about their work with Deena Motiwalla and Vera Kriechbaum, both of Dubai, during the opening of Kaleidoscope. Amy Leang / The National

“You are all aware of the Indian presence. You have seen Indians in different walks of life, as workers, as professionals, as business persons. But very few of you who are non-Indian will have seen Indians as artists.” Talmiz Ahmad, India’s ambassador to the UAE, has a plan to redress the balance.

We’re at the opening of the Kaleidoscope art exhibition at Dubai Ladies’ Club, the latest stage in the ambassador’s programme to refresh ancient cultural ties between the UAE and India. These links have been neglected, so Ahmad believes, even as the two nations grow ever more important to one another.

Hence this restorative campaign, which first bore fruit in November with a series of screenings of Indian and Emirati films at Adach. For the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair next month, 10 Indian books are to be translated into Arabic, and a major survey of India’s vibrant contemporary art scene is planned for October.

For now, there’s Kaleidoscope, an exhibition that showcases the art of Indian expatriates in the UAE alongside that of several prominent Emirati artists in order to “see how this expression compares”, as the ambassador put it.

As the opening’s guest of honour, the venerable Emirati painter Abdul Qader al Rais, says: “We can make, with art, a good connection between different cultures, different ideas, different people.” And on the evidence of Kaleidoscope, these different people may be coming from a similar place after all.

The Indian contingent have brought out a very big gun indeed in the shape of Maqbool Fida Husain. He is perhaps the most important painter the subcontinent has produced in a century. Star players simply don’t come with much more clout.

There’s no shame in being overshadowed by the man Forbes magazine called the “Picasso of India”. It is remarkable how youthful Husain’s paintings seem – especially as the artist approaches his 94th birthday.

His 10 images startle with graffiti vibrance. They seem to flicker on the canvas like celluloid, like the strangest old Chuck Jones cartoons, and yet they also resound with the power of myth. He combines letters and numerals to create the semblance of a Viking longboat; a black sheet is whipped off a palette bed to reveal a book and gleaming crimson beads like drops of blood.

A black cube written over in blockish white script bounces through a red desert sunset. Everything is dense with symbol, compelling as a dream. It’s not for nothing that Husain is India’s most expensive painter: once you get in front of his pictures, it’s hard to tear yourself away.

The other elder statesman of the show, al Rais, also turns in characteristically excellent work, as limpid and serene as anything in his oeuvre. Windows is one of his curious flattened courtyard scenes, a schematic arrangement of tiles, shutters and decorative grilles suffused in an aqueous light and obscured by the rain of blue diamonds that have become his trademark.

These also feature in Makkaw, one of his impressionistic oceans that hover at the brink of total abstraction. Roiling waves and a sky of fire are tempered by the oddness of that floating confetti, so suggestive of enchantment.

Al Rais is a peculiar artist in this regard. Tasteful almost to a fault, his ever-present edge of mysticism – that gleam of another world shining through the surface of things – manages to forestall any suggestion of triviality. At their best, his pictures actually do something to the viewer: they bring about a sort of contemplative peace whose very pleasantness can be a little confounding to western art admirers raised in more sardonic traditions.

To the extent that the show is intended to trace the connections between Indian and Emirati art, it does well to reveal something of al Rais’s long shadow. His floating diamonds and orange-and-blue palette are present in a piece by the Indian artist Parameswaran, which otherwise strikes very un-Raisean notes.

Titled The Sentence, it depicts an army of flame-like ghosts bearing a gold coffin on their shoulders.

Rope nooses are fixed to the canvas, their significance pointed out by an accompanying text that begins: “The Palestine question is still hanging in the balance, by more than a thread.” Certainly it is hard to imagine al Rais producing something in the same vein, yet this angry piece seems to consciously allude to the older artist’s work.

So, too, does Purification, by the Emirati painter Mona al Khaja. Once again, blue and orange dominate, though al Rais is also evoked by highly textured brushwork and the radiant appearance of a patterned screen rather like the ones in Windows.

Al Khaja’s pieces lack the sense of higher harmony that the master seems so effortlessly to achieve. Yet it is interesting to see his simple thematic and gestural elements recombined in pursuit of more imposing effects – a sense of nervy focus that replaces his ethereal lightness. How intriguing that he should have created not merely a set of mannerisms but a painterly language with the flexibility to produce such opposed impressions.

A different sort of linguistic adoption is seen in the work of the Rajasthani painter Mamta Valrani, whose two-part series Blending In – elongated collages in bleeding tones of brine and rust– includes scraps of Arabic calligraphy. As the artist explained to me and the title implies, this is an act of merging that is as much social as painterly.

By intriguing contrast, Henna, by Juwairiya al Khaja, recalls the treasures of the Moghul empire, despite flowing from the brush of an Emirati painter. An exquisite detail study of a woman’s decorated feet on a patterned rug, it wryly undercuts its own finery by the inclusion, in the corner, of a coir doormat with a pair of sensible work pumps resting on it.

Elsewhere there is work that is gloriously and undisguisably Indian. Nivedita Saha’s Mutation series, for example, seems to echo the headier extremes of Ledakhi Buddhist art.

Protean figures are constructed from great looping freehand lines, lidded eyes and Cupid smiles emerging from a fever dream of birds, insects and flowers. One shaven-headed homunculus darts out a chameleon tongue to catch a dragonfly. Another unzips its head to reveal miniature versions of its own masked face. These pen and ink drawings are works of voluptuous strangeness, sneakingly sensuous despite the economy of their means.

The greatest pleasure of the show, however, is the chance to revel in the sense of benign rivalry that has been the greatest driver of artistic excellence. Several of the Indian artists to whom I spoke admitted that they hadn’t known of one another’s existence until they began their applications for Kaleidoscope (or if they had known one another, they hadn’t known that they each made art).

It will be fascinating to see how this new sense of community and common pursuit – and competition – will affect their work. It is a joy, too, to see the productions of Emirati artists placed in a wider cultural context, and engaged in international dialogue. Such experiments can only enrich the cultural life of the Emirates. Here’s looking forward to the next stage of the ambassador’s plan.

elake@thenational.ae

Kaleidoscope runs until tomorrow at the Dubai Ladies’ Club, Jumeirah Beach Road.