Package deal

• Last Updated: February 27. 2009 1:48PM UAE / February 27. 2009 9:48AM GMT

The rapacious collector Charles Saatchi has decided that art from the Middle East is the next big thing, and crowds are flocking to his new London exhibition.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie considers the pitfalls of curating with a map.

All images courtesy of The Saatchi Gallery and all photographs by Steve White / The Saatchi Gallery


Three months ago, the artist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab mounted an exhibition of photographs in Beirut. Her images explored the power dynamic between East and West through the juxtaposition of objects – including blond-haired Barbie dolls, old Iraqi dinars, Hizbollah memorabilia and a dizzying array of tourist trinkets – that Saab culled from street markets in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. When the show opened, the hosting venue, which has a strict “no politics” policy, asked the artist to remove nine of the images. Saab was furious. But the organiser of the exhibition was thrilled. “Now we’ll sell the works to Charles Saatchi!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together like a schemer in a silent film.

Charles Saatchi is one of the world’s most rapacious collectors of contemporary art. A former advertising executive who cofounded the Saatchi & Saatchi agency with his brother Maurice in 1970, he has spent much of the last 20 years packaging artists into movements and promoting them as the next big thing. In the 1980s, he showcased American artists such as Jeff Koons and Peter Halley in the exhibition New York Art Now. In the 1990s, he branded Young British Art in its entirety with Sensation, a show of 42 artists that included Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Chris Ofili. In the last decade, he has hyped Young Americans, Eurovision and USA Today, among many other initiatives. Now he is going global. Having just concluded a show of contemporary art from China called The Revolution Continues, he has an as-yet-untitled exhibition of contemporary art from India in the works.

Because Saatchi tends to acquire artists’ work when they are emerging, and to sell them at a handsome profit when they are established (a process that is encouraged by association with the Saatchi brand), his collection is in a constant state of upheaval. When his interests change – when he starts selling in one category and buying in another – his actions reverberate in the market. So when Saatchi began collecting contemporary art from the Middle East a few years ago, it sent shivers down the spines of artists, curators, collectors and gallery owners from Tangier to Tehran. And when he scooped up Huma Mujli’s sculpture Arabian Delight from the exhibition Desperately Seeking Paradise at Art Dubai last year – amid rumours that the work had been ferreted out of sight for causing offence – many observers assumed that Saatchi was on the hunt for the most outrageous, sensational and taboo-busting works he could find.

Now that Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East has opened at The Saatchi Gallery in London, such speculations have been largely laid to rest. This exhibition of 86 works by 19 artists, on view through May 6, is decidedly low on controversy. It consists primarily of paintings and sculptures, along with a room-sized installation, a replica of a refugee camp, and a few series of photographs. Though stylistically diverse, Unveiled emphasises a certain aesthetic messiness – loopy brushstrokes and chaotic compositions shot through with humour, playfulness and irony – that echoes Saatchi’s previous pursuits (particularly his exhibitions Neurotic Realism and The Triumph of Painting).

Perhaps by its very existence, or by its inclusion of several works that hinge on sarcasm and low-level sexual perversion, Unveiled will complicate some of the misconceptions that western viewers have of the Middle East as a region overwhelmed by violence. And a few of the artists included in the show – such as Rokni Haerizadeh and Tala Madani – are already poised to perform well in the art market, so Saatchi is likely to make good on his Middle East investment even if the rest are never seen or heard from again. As to whether or not Unveiled offers its audience a useful introduction, cross-section or representation of the contemporary art that is being made and shown in the region – well, it doesn’t.

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Contemporary art from the Middle East has seen its stock rise in recent years. This is partly because several artists of Arab or Iranian origin have earned international acclaim and blue chip gallery representation on the strengths of their work. It is also partly because conflicts in the Middle East have been more numerous of late, and artists who live in the region have been increasingly called upon to explain these complex political situations, or to provide alternatives to mainstream media accounts. But the spike in interest is mostly due to the fact that the art world has expanded tremendously, and has been systematically tapping around for emerging markets. There is no longer a strict New York-London-Berlin axis. The art world today looks more like the route map of a major airline. The growth of international biennials and fairs, the proliferation of auction house activity, the development of commercial gallery systems and the franchising of cultural institutions such as the Guggeinheim have turned the art world into a thoroughly globalised entity.

The Middle East still clocks in a distant third to China and India in the race to open up new frontiers. And within the crude category of “Middle Eastern art”, contemporary Iranian art is substantially out-pricing contemporary Arab art (no wonder more than half of the artists in Unveiled are Iranian). But the interest is there, and it has found expression in a series of sprawling survey exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including the French curator Catherine David’s Contemporary Arab Representations project that toured from Sweden to Spain, Jack Persekian’s DisORIENTation show at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art’s Without Boundary exhibition in New York and the British Museum’s Word Into Art in London. Unveiled is a slightly different beast. It does not build in, or even betray an awareness of, previous museum exhibitions. If anything, it is in dialogue with auction sales and commercial gallery rosters. But as public manifestations of a western desire to experience the Middle East as a generator of culture, all these initiatives are all part of the same problem.

Geography makes for a miserable curatorial conceit. All of these exhibitions start from maps rather than artworks. They propose to introduce regions rather than explore the nuances of an individual artist’s practice. They shoehorn artists into a format that is set in advance (pick the region first, the talent second) rather than letting their works give rise to ideas that could, if given the time and consideration they deserve, structure exhibitions from the inside out. Inevitably, regional shows end up playing at representation, with the artists put in the position not of expressing themselves but of interpreting, packaging and reducing for easy consumption their culture or their country. This elevates biographical over critical interpretations. It flattens complexities and panders to those in search of the exotic, the foreign and the monolithic other. It’s all rather patronising, as if the artists from a given region aren’t good enough, interesting enough, accomplished enough or successful enough to stand on their own. And when it comes to the Middle East, a part of the world that houses so many countries, languages, dialects, religions, sects, socioeconomic classes, educational systems, social customs, traditions, cultures, histories and contemporary political situations, it simply makes no sense.

Moreover, curating by geography exerts a great deal of pressure on artists who live and work in the Middle East. Of course they want their work to be shown, and to make a living from their art. But there are risks. What if artists realise that curators are looking for representative works – imagery related to conflict, for example, or the veil – and start changing their styles accordingly? What if curators and gallery directors start courting controversy to attract international attention? Exposure in regional exhibitions can bring with it the kind of fevered art market speculation that has historically done great damage to artists early on in their careers (exhibiting with Saatchi is particularly risky in this regard). Do artists participate in such shows, or do they hold off until they are embraced as individuals rather than members of a travelling troupe?

One could argue that western curators and the institutions that back them continue to put on regional shows because they maintain a hierarchy – the West above the rest – and because they satisfy public interests without going through the hard work of reconfiguring the entire world in conceptual or theoretical terms. For example: another show currently on display in London, the Serpentine Gallery’s Indian Highway, is a wreck, trying as it does to squish the entire subcontinent into a tiny space in which none of the works have much room to impress themselves on viewers (there are even video installations mounted just outside the bathroom doors). The exhibition seems to express and encourage utter amazement that there are contemporary artists in India at all.

But elsewhere in the city there are galleries and curators who are more than up to the task of thinking through the globalised art world. At the Lisson Gallery, two videos by the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari (who is not included in Unveiled) were, until February 21, being elegantly projected in a group exhibition whose artists were connected by conceptual practices rather than geographical affinities. A week earlier, the non-profit art space Parasol Unit concluded a haunting exhibition devoted to the painter YZ Kami, who was born in Iran and is also not featured in Unveiled. The show naturally emphasised Kami’s luminous, ghostly approach to portraiture over his national provenance. Meanwhile, the gallery Pilar Corrias Ltd is hosting a show of new paintings by Tala Madani, one of the stars of Unveiled, through February 28. This exhibition is tightly focused on Madani’s quirky exploration of “dazzle painting”, a system of camouflage that was developed during the First World War to confuse U-boat commanders (and was inspired, bizarrely, by the Parisian avant-garde and cubism).

More ambitiously, the current Tate Triennial effectively eschews its own mandate – to celebrate current trends in British art – by including artists from around the world. The exhibition includes a wonderful trio of works by Navin Rawanchaikul exploring migration from India and Pakistan to Thailand and Japan; Subodh Gupta’s mesmerising steel sculpture Lines of Control; and Walead Beshty’s ruefully relevant series of damaged photographs and banged up glass boxes produced by passing film through airport security x-ray machines and shipping packages back and forth across the globe via FedEx. Together, these objects explore the concept of altermodernity, which was coined by the Tate curator Nicolas Bourriaud. According to the catalogue text, altermodernity “arises out of negotiations between agents from different cultures and geographical locations. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot.” Bourriaud is interested in artists’ ideas and strategies, not their addresses – and that can only be good.

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In its first three weeks alone, Unveiled has packed huge crowds into The Saatchi Gallery, which, having previously taken up residence in a former North London paint factory and on the ground floor of the South Bank’s County Hall, is now luxuriously housed in the Duke of York’s Headquarters, a grand, 19th-century structure located near Sloane Square in Chelsea. The 6,500-square-metre space is divided into 13 galleries, each a pristine white cube infused with soft light. There could hardly be a more sumptuous setting for the contemplation of contemporary art. All of the 86 works are gorgeously installed and each is given ample breathing room. Several of the artists fill galleries of their own.

Unveiled starts out strong, with two spectacular sculptures by Marwan Rechmaoui. The first, entitled Beirut Caoutchouc, consists of a map of Beirut made from thick black rubber, cut into some 50 pieces that correspond to the shapes of the city’s many sectors and snapped together like the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle splayed out on the floor. Streets, alleyways and stairwells are indicated by shallow grooves, but Beirut Caoutchouc offers no identifying markers. The entire city is flattened, stripped of experiential associations or topographical details and rendered without hierarchies, without the palpable barriers of religion, gender or class that otherwise guide one’s movements through the urban maze. The Green Line that once separated the east side of Beirut from the west, for example, is simply one depressed line among many; it no longer signifies division, destruction, disappearance or death.

The second piece, entitled Spectre, is a scaled down replica of a Beirut apartment bloc where Rechmaoui lived in the late 1990s. The building, known as the Yacoubian, was originally designed as an upscale housing complex. But with the outbreak of the Civil War in Lebanon, the building’s affluent residents began to move out, and refugees, many of them escaping the first Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in 1978, began to move in. They adapted their new dwellings to suit their needs, breaking the sleek, modernist lines of the building’s façade with laundry, furniture, advertisements for home-grown businesses, and enclosures that turned balconies into extra rooms. With time, the Yacoubian building lost its lustre, and it is now a far from glamorous address. But Rechmaoui treats it like a glittering piece of history. In Spectre, each apartment is rendered in grout, aluminium and glass, and each is slightly separated from the adjacent units in what the artist terms a “gentle explosion” of the building. Rechmaoui has added certain details – curtains, signs, painted doors – but the embellishments are spare enough to keep the piece from looking like a dollhouse. There is nothing in the work that speaks directly of war. Spectre is more an account of adaptation and creativity in times of social and economic collapse.

After Rechmaoui’s works, Unveiled tanks rather quickly. There are a handful of exquisite paintings by Hayv Kahraman and Tala Madani. Kahraman works in oils on linen and borrows beautifully from the vocabularies of Persian miniatures, Japanese woodblock prints and Italian Renaissance portraits. Where Kahraman’s works are mysteriously serene, Madani’s are outrageously perverse. Her large- and small-scale paintings in oil, marker and occasional spray paint depict uproarious and ambiguous vignettes featuring a cast of paunchy, hairy men who arrange themselves in situations ranging from possibly violent to certainly sexual. They jab each other with forks, act out strangulation, engage in autoeroticism, stroke their underarm hair and jam their legs into birthday cakes.

Unveiled also features a series of dizzyingly obsessive sculptures by Diana al Hadid, exploring ornate yet crumbling architecture: the Tower of Babel imagined as an upturned gothic church, a pipe organ that doubles as an amphitheatre reminiscent of the Roman Coliseum. But the rest is mostly dreck, or has been exhibited elsewhere so many times that to propose it as “new” is questionable. Shadi Ghadirian’s untitled photographs of women draped in colourful fabrics with kitchen utensils obscuring their faces are still lovely. But they have been ubiquitous for nearly a decade. Kader Attia’s roomful of aluminium foil women is a showstopper. But Attia has made better, less obvious and more sensitive work than this. Wafa Hourani’s multimedia installation Qalandia 2067, a model of a West Bank refugee camp as imagined a century after the war of 1967, is chaotically detailed and an unabashed crowd pleaser. But miniaturising a locality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not, on its own, suggest meaningful commentary or critique.

It is heartening that so many people have gone to see the Saatchi show, and that some 60 newspapers and magazines around the world have reviewed it. But it is dispiriting to read so many critics, particularly those in the British press, claim to have never encountered any art from the Middle East before – they are missing a great deal in their own backyard. And it is discomforting to think that anyone might take the exhibition seriously as a reflection of contemporary art from the Middle East – or, worse, of the region itself. It’s a big place, and Unveiled doesn’t quite get it – nor should it, and hopefully other institutions will stop trying to do the same.


Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports for The Review from Beirut.