THE 'EXTRA' IN ORDINARY

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Mar 21, 2013 - Clockwise from left: Art Dubai Fair Director Antonia Carver with Matthew Jones and Kate Jones from John J
21 MARCH 2013 I ISSUE 3 I ART DUBAI EDITION

THE ‘EXTRA’ IN ORDINARY THE WINNERS OF the 2013 Abraaj Group Art Prize (AGAP) have been hard at work since last year’s fair when they were announced as the recipients of the world’s most expensive art prize. At $500,000 split up between five artists, AGAP sees winners Vartan Avakian (Lebanon), Iman Issa (Egypt), Huma Mulji (Pakistan), Hrair Sarkissian (Syria) and Rayyane Tabet (Lebanon) present the fruit of their labour with guest curator Murtaza Vali through extra | ordinary, Abraaj's 2013 exhibition. Vali takes Canvas Daily through each of the works. “Rayyane’s work is situated at the surprising intersection of art history, superstition and the conflict-ridden recent past of the Middle East. He produced 5000 tiny works in lead as a reference to a divining ritual his grandmother performed on him to ward off the evil eye, producing a few pieces every day as a daily routine.”

Mohammed Kazem. Directions (Triangle). 2006. Aluminium and LED light. 88 x 214 cm. Image courtesy Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, Dubai.

SOLD Starting with Ladies Day, the public opening of Art Dubai saw a steady crowd and a buoyant mood among gallerists, with many sales made to new collectors.

Rayyane Tabet. (Detail, one of 5000 pieces) FIRE/CAST/ DRAW. 2013. Lead. 3 cm squared each.

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THE BIG SALES of the night came at first-time fair participant Victoria Miro (A18) with three works by Yayoi Kusama selling to collectors familiar to the gallery for between $250,000–650,000. Berlin-based Arndt (A29) sold a nickeled bronze sculpture by Wim Delvoye for between $250,000–400,000 to a collector new to the gallery. London-based Rose Issa Projects (A21) sold Brighter Than a Thousand Suns by Tagreed Darghouth, Heap 2013 by Mohamed Said Baalbaki, Veiled Nonsense by Meliheh Afnan and several works by Irada Icaza for undisclosed prices. Melbourne-based Sutton Gallery (J30) made their first sale at the fair with two works by Egyptian artist Raafat Ishak, entitled New Egypt and Old Egypt selling to an

institution for a combined $38,000. Founding partner of Bangalore-based Tasveer Gallery (J28) Abhishek Poddar noted tremendous interest and was pleased to have made sales to new collectors. The gallery, which presents a solo booth by Karen Knorr, sold all five editions of A Place like Amravali, Udaipur City, Sairus Crane, one edition of Survivors, Deogarth Palace, Deogarth and one edition of Bakhti, Path of Saints, Shiva Temple, Hampi – all for between $11,000–19,000. Milan-based Laura Bulian Gallery (J27) made one sale – Hotel, a C-Print by Kyrgyzstani duo Gulanara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, which is part of their New Silk Continued on page 3

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SOLD (CONT.) Continued from page 1

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Gallery Wendi Norris (J12) sold a piece by Kelly Barrie, Slow Dance (Enta Omry), an archival lightjet print for $18,000 to a Singaporebased collector. Dubai-based Grey Noise (A5), whose artist Fahd Burki had just won the John Jones Art on Paper Award, sold his sculpture, Liar, for $15,000 to an established Paris-based collector. Berlin-based Galerie Tanja Wagner (A6) sold 30 Years After by Šejla Kameric – the gallery’s first sale – for $7500 to a local collector. Fair regular Agial Art Gallery (A9) did not disclose prices but were pleased with the response to their booth and sold one mixed media work by Mohamad Muraddine to a UAE-based collector and a Mohamed Said Baalbaki work on canvas to the Mokbel Art Collection in Beirut. Athens and Thessaloniki-based Kalfayan Gallery (A24) were extremely pleased, having made sales to private and institutional collections including two photographs by Abraaj Prize winner Hrair Sarkissian and one work by Nina Papaconstaintinou. All prices were undisclosed. Paris-based Galerie Chantal Crousel (A27) sold a work by Mona Hatoum and two installations by Korean artist Haege Yang. Istanbulbased Galerist (J10) sold Sister Moon, Umbrella Sun by Haluk Akakçe for $59,000 to a Dubai-based collector and a diptych by :mentalKLINIK for $36,000 to an undisclosed collector. Paris-based Yvon Lambert (A12) sold an oil on canvas work by Markus Schinwald, Sisters, for between $50,000–130,000. The Pace Gallery (J14) continued to see high interest in their works and sold Papier Pliés by Yto Barrada to a European foundation for an undisclosed price. Almine Rech Gallery (J13) sold several works by Lebanese artist Ziad Antar for between $8000–12,000 to regional collectors. Dubai-based Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde (J3) sold Directions by Emirati artist Mohammed Kazem, who will be representing the UAE at the Venice Biennale, for $40,000 to a regional collector along with another work from the Captain America series by Ramin Haerizadeh. Galerie Krinzinger (J1) sold an untitled work by Waqas Khan for $7400 to a Switzerland-based collector. “I could have sold this Waqas piece five times – everyone wants it!” said the gallery’s Manfred Wiplinger. The gallery also sold Alfred Tarazi’s The Glorious Land for $14,000 to a Lebanese collector, while Beirut-based Running Horse Contemporary Art Space (A28) sold two works by the Lebanese artist one for $14,000 and the second for $18,000 as well as a sculpture by Greely Myatt for $2500. Manama-based Albareh Art Gallery (A32) sold six works by Annie Kursdrdju for undisclosed prices.

TODAY 14:00–14:15

Global Art Forum_7: Frant: Futurity. A talk by writer Douglas Coupland.

14:15–15:15

Global Art Forum_7: Discussion: Place (Ramallah). Hosted by Shumon Basar, with Mourid Barghouti, Shuruq Harb and Guy Mannes–Abbott.

15:15–15:45

Global Art Forum_7: Lecture: Score (in Arab Music). By sound artist Tarek Atoui.

15:45–16:00

Global Art Forum_7: Readings: Drone Fiction.

16:00–17:00

Global Art Forum_7: Discussion: Score. Hosted by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Tarek Atoui, Tristan Bera, Dominique Gonzalez–Foerster and André Vida.

17:00–17:30

Global Art Forum_7: Presentation: Purity. By artist Hassan Khan.

16:00

Book Launch: On the Banks of Geniuses: The First Harbor – Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum Yola Bahnassi

17:00

Tour: Art Dubai Projects* Meet curators and artists participating in a dynamic programme of new commissions, performances, radio and other projects featuring over 40 artists from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

17:00–18:00

Workshop: Sheikha Manal Little Artists Shadow Puppet Workshop (Ages 5–10). Repeated from 18:30– 19:30

17.30–18.00

Book Signing: Youssef Nabil. Bookshop Foyer.

17:30–18:30

Tour: Sheikha Manal Little Artists Discovery Tour

18.00–18.30

Tour: Marker* Join Bisi Silva on a tour of the curated section of concept stands which focus on West Africa.

ERRATUM

18:00–18:30

We apologise for the printing error that ran in Canvas Daily in Issue 2 with Idris Khan's Impossible Guidence artwork in our Satellite Exhibitions feature on page 08.

Tour: The Abraaj Group Art Prize Visit extra | ordinary

18.30–20.00

Book launch and panel discussion: The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013 extra | ordinary The winners discuss the themes of the exhibition.

19:00

Tour: Sculpture on the Beach Visit the sculpture park on the Mina A'Salam Beach to see installation and sculptural works selected by guest curator Chus Martinez.

20:00–1:00

Absolut Lounge | Absolut Art Nights Mina A'Salam Beach.

Road project. The work went to a collector familiar to the gallery for $6000. Paris-based Galerie Hussenot (J21) did not disclose prices but sold three works by Mounir Fatmi and a work by Kirsten Everberg, all to international collectors new to the gallery. London-based Bischoff/ Weiss (A10) continued to do well, selling four works by Rana Begum for between $8000–15,000 each, one work by Raphael Zarka for $5000 and a C-print by Aya Haider for $8000, all to undisclosed collectors. Brussels-based Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (A15) sold a sculpture entitled Mutus Liber 20 by Kendell Geers for over $31,000 to a European collector. Ayyam Gallery (A45) saw strong sales with Syrian artist Tammam Azzam’s Syrian Museum – Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (Freedom Graffiti), a work that recently created a great deal of online buzz. The gallery also sold Nadim Karam's Complicity, a unique edition, to a collector from Saudi Arabia, two concrete footballs by Khaled Jarrar, a work on canvas by Thaier Helal, which consists of 1500 metal spoons, and multiple editions of video paintings by Safwan Dahoul. All prices were undisclosed. London-based Selma Feriani (A1) sold another photograph by Roula Halawani for $10,000 and a bronze sculpture by Egyptian-Armenian Armin Agop for $15,000, both to regional collectors. Madrid-based Sabrina Amrani Art Gallery (J7) had a very busy booth and sold four more pieces from UBIK’s Rant series for $3000 each and four pieces by Waqas Khan from his Forming Spaces series for a total of $7200. Wim Delvoye. (Detail) Nautilus. 2012. Nickeled bronze. 32 x 16 x 30 cm. Image courtesy Arndt Berlin/Singapore.

Idris Khan. (Detail) Impossible Existence. 2013. Oil base relief on ink on screened 410gsm acid free paper. 100 x 118 cm. Image courtesy Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, Dubai.

SUB TO SCRIB CA E NO NVAS VIEW W ! OUR SUB

IN THE CANVAS MARCH/APRIL ISSUE Five neon colours celebrate our second annual Power 50 edition, which presents the movers and shakers who galvanise the regional art scene. In tribute to the late Farideh Lashai, each cover features a rabbit from her Catching the Moon artist book.

50 2013 THE POWER HE P

50 2013 THE POWER HE P

50 2013 THE POWER HE P

50 2013 THE POWER HE P

SCR E IPTIO XCLUS IV N PR OM E ON OTIO PAG E 21 N 50

2013 THE POWER HE P

*Book a place on the tour at any of the information desks. All Global Art Forum_7 sessions are held at Fort Island.

Gallery feature on Nathalie Obadia's three spaces and eclectic roster.

Inside Iranian artist Reza Derakshani’s Dubai studio.

Follow us on Twitter @CanvasTweet Follow us on Pintrest canvasmag

Tunisian-born Nadia KaabiLinke's conceptual practices.

Palestinian artist Shadi Habib Allah's exploration of new media.

Like us on Facebook www.facebook.com/CanvasMagazine

Lebanese-born Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013 winner Rayyane Tabet.

Exclusive preview of Youssef Nabil's Mediterranean Women.

For more information visit www.artdubai.ae

Proceeds from ticket, catalogue and bag sales at Art Dubai will be donated to the World Food Programme operations to assist families in need through the Arab world, particularly those affected by the conflict in Syria.

Follow us on Instagram @CanvasTweet

21 MAR 2013 I CANVAS DAILY I ISSUE 3 I ART DUBAI EDITION

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POWER OF THREE

MADE IN THE UAE The dXb Store returns to Art Dubai this year, showcasing limited edition items all designed and made in the UAE.

45 AED /$12

Foldubai by Caravan.

350 AED /$96

Tablecloth clutch by LoNa Studio.

The third biannual Jameel Prize announces 10 shortlisted artists. IN SEPTEMBER 2010, Munich’s Haus der Kunst presented The Future of Tradition – The Tradition of Future, an exhibition which commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the West’s largest show of Islamic art staged in 1910 in Munich. Those who had visited the former would have been awestruck by Nada Debs’s Concrete Carpet, a massive piece, which has since been acquired by Doha’s Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, and that locked the Lebanese-born furniture designer into the Jameel Prize 2013 shortlist. The stunning work, comprised of 28 panels featuring Arabic calligraphy and the Japanese Kanji script, also incorporates Debs’s trademark motherof-pearl inlay. “There’s a rhythm to it, like haiku poetry,” explains Debs of the piece, which reflects on today’s industrialisation vis-à-vis tradition. “Concrete is symbolic of speed, industry and manmade manufacture whereas mother-of-pearl is organic and pure and literally shines through as an emblem of hope,” she adds. Debs, one of 10 shortlisted artists for the third biannual Jameel Prize, joins Waqas Khan, Faig Ahmed, Mounir Fatmi, Rahul Jain, Dice Kayek, Laurent Mareschal, Nasser Al-Salem, Florie Salnot and Pascal Zoghbi in an exhibition in December at London’s V&A, when the winner will be announced. The $32,250 prize, supported by the Abdul Latif Jameel Community Initiatives, awards artists and designers whose work is inspired by Islamic traditions of craft and design. Among the incredible variety of pieces in this edition are works on paper by Pakistani artist Khan, two of which are presented through Sabrina Amrani Gallery (J7) and Galerie Krinzinger (J1) at Art Dubai (a third will be shown at the V&A). Wholly pensive and utterly meditative, Khan’s ink on paper pieces see the Lahore-based artist create what he terms as “a fluid production” of pieces that are essentially an extension of his self. “It’s a journey. It has to be accurate and it’s so concentrated because it’s becomes a part of me,” he explains. His labour-intensive practice involves him holding his breath, keeping a steady grasp on the pen and delving into a trance-like state. “My hand becomes one with the pen,” he says. “This is all about energy and my desire to share it.” French-born Mareschal, on the other hand, visited Jerusalem as part of a student exchange programme in 1997. What was meant to be a period of a few weeks became five years, during which time he discovered local

160 AED /$44

T-shirt by Mubarik Jaffery.

200 AED /$55

Pure Gold Skin Jewellery by Nadine Kanso.

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Above: Waqas Khan. Tranquil Pool. 2012. Archival red ink on white wasli paper. 70 x 53 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Sabrina Armani Art Gallery, Madrid; Nada Debs.(Detail) Concrete Carpet. 2010. Concrete and mother-of-pearl with stainless steel beads. 900 x 350 x 4 cm. Photography by Marino Solokhov. Image courtesy Mathaf, Doha.

Left: Faig Ahmed. Hollow. 2011. Woollen handmade carpet. Variable dimensions. Photography by Fakhriyya Mammedova. Image courtesy of YAY! Gallery, Baku; Nasser Al-Salem. Kul. 2012. Hand painted on archival paper. 100 x 100 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Athr Gallery, Jeddah.

spices and soaps. His time spent in Jerusalem has had an enduring influence on his practice, which sees him create ephemeral artworks “inherently linked to the situation in Palestine and Israel and how everything can change in a minute,” he says. “It is the fragility of life, suggested by the materials that I use that compounds this notion.” For the Prize, Mareschal will create a newer version of his Beiti (meaning ‘my house’ in Arabic) artwork, inspired by the mosaics, motifs, embroidery and spices of Palestine. Many of the works are large in scale, and for the Prize’s 2013 edition, will be exhibited at the V&A’s Porter Gallery. “The works will be able to breathe in this larger space, which we’re happy to have gotten the slot for,” says the gallery’s Salma Tuqan, who added that the 2013 edition saw 270 applications – many more in design and from as far and wide as Algeria, Brazil, Kosovo, Norway and Russia. “The museum itself is an art and design institution with foundations in art and craft,” she adds. After the winner is announced on 10 December, the exhibition remains at the museum until the end of April, from where it will tour to different cities as part of it mission, says Tuqan, “to make the Prize more global and open it up to more audiences.”

Dame Zaha Hadid is Patron of the Jameel Prize and the 2013 edition’s judging panel includes: t Thomas Heatherwick, designer and founder of Heatherwick Studio t Rachid Koraïchi, winner of the Jameel Prize 2011 t Martin Roth, V&A Director t Nada Shabout, Associate Professor of Art History and the Director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute (CAMCSI) at the University of North Texas, USA t Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès, Founding Director of the Khatt Foundation, Centre for Arabic Typography, The Netherlands

ABRAAJ (CONT.) Continued from page 1

> “Huma was inspired by Wunderkammers, the cabinets of curiosity that became popular in the 16th century; she filled her wooden cabinet with all kinds of mundane and sometimes nasty objects like extracted human teeth or dolls, lending her work a prevailing melancholy through a meditation on the mortality of all things, human or not.“

Q&A WITH MURTAZA VALI extra|ordinary, says Vali, is a distinct exhibition in that the works presented this year differ widely from previous winning works. “They are all somehow wholes made up of parts,” he explains. “From fragmentation of works into a series of photographs to thousands of tiny lead pieces and little gold figurines encased in acrylic balls to a wonderful cabinet filled with objects – it struck me how the works were structured similarly. Also, they all deal with what I call the minor register of culture and history. The artists shy away from major historical concerns and turn their attention to minor things.”

Huma Mujli. (Detail) The Miraculous Lives of This and That. 2013. Wooden cabinet with various objects including taxidermy animals, als, plastic toys and dust. 165.1 x 138.4 x 231 cm.

How did works by such a varied group of artists all come together? They are all presented together in a unified exhibition space, so it gives it a museum feel. Some of the works are almost site-specific installations, so it was an interesting challenge to put them together. We had to leave a lot of room for experimentation, even at later stages, as the artists were unsure about what the space would be like until it was finally built. Even with that, we’ve allowed artists a level of autonomy, a zone dedicated to each of them. It all came together well. Tell us about the book that has been produced for AGAP this year. The relationship between wholes and parts was really important for me, and while in the past the books have been larger than life museum quality hardcovers, I wanted to, through the part and whole idea, move away from what was done before. The publication is fragmented into five books, one for each artist – they’re like mini monographs, and for all five artists this will be their first dedicated book. So, the book functions as both a set of monographs and as the AGAP publication. Each book contains essays on the artist’s Abraaj work and their wider practice and the back of the book contains interviews with the artists conducted by me. In the middle of the book, there’s a 48-page full colour section, which we call the artists’ pages, which was their forum for presenting their research or process.

Hrair Sarkissian. (Detail) Background. 2013. Six duratrans prints. 180 x 227 cm (unframed).

“Hrair focuses on the backgrounds of photography studios; they affect how people present themselves to the camera but attention is rarely paid to them. By removing the sitter from the foreground, Hrair forces us to really look at the material realities of studio photography.“

“Vartan’s work is very much a question of scale: he researched forgotten leaders of failed coups and took the poor quality small images he found of them and turned them into life-like photographically detailed statues – as a way of commemorating that moment before they failed.“

Iman Issa. (Detail) Common Elements. 2013. Framed c-print. 54 x 36 cm.

What has this experience been like for you? It’s been great. I really feel like a collaborator on these projects. There was an openness in the work that allowed me to play an active part. I came in to produce a certain discourse around the work that would follow the work from its presentation through to its afterlife, when it will be shown elsewhere.

“Iman’s work features excerpts of the autobiographies of intellectuals, all decontextualised to shed their individuality and blend into a collective narrative dedicated to thought, culture and justice. All the works emerge from the ordinary, but they are set up in structures and forms that allow us to see how rich ordinary can be.“

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Vartan Avakian. (Detail) A Very Short History of Tall Men. 2013. Seven gold statues in clear acrylic. Variable dimensions. All images courtesy Abraaj Group Art Prize, Dubai.

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20 arts spaces. One district. Dubai.

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