Art Dubai 2017: Gallery focus, Sabrina Amrani

Images from The Fugitive, a solo series by Nicene Kossentini on view at Sabrina Amrani gallery booth, Art Dubai, 2017. Courtesy Sabrina Amrani Gallery and the artist
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This year's Art Dubai is now officially underway and at The Art Blog, we will bring you a few highlights of the fair over the next few days. Although there is so much to discover and see, it can be useful to have a few pointers of where to start so for the next few blog posts, I will focus on some of my favourite booths.

First up is Sabrina Amrani, a Madrid-gallery with a really strong international programme. They are presenting Fugitive, a solo exhibition by Tunisian artist Nicène Kossentini with a body of work completed during a residency in Casa Árabe, Andalucía. The artist was entranced by the Islamic geometric architecture of Córdoba’s red and white double-arched Great Mosque and produced these stunning drawings that borrow from those aesthetics and also pursue her existential quest by examining the contradictions and fluidity of life and memory.

If the artist was entranced by the mosque and its architecture, I was entranced by her work, which are truly gorgeous in real life and, drawn in a liquid blue, they reference the mysterious and immersive nature of water.

There is also a diptych “Tawq al-Hamamah” (The Ring of the Dove) that is a copy of an excerpt from the eponymous treatise of love written around 1022 by Ibn Hazm of Córdoba – except she has allowed the ink to blur so the complexity of communication is called into question.

* Sabrina Amrani booth is located in Hall 1, Booth C2.