Art Here - 2nd edition

There is a new temporary exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi Forum, the 2nd edition of the Art Here, Richard Mille Art Prize exhibition. This edition called on GCC national and residents to take part, and 10 artists were shortlisted, working in different media - all engaging with the notions of 'Icon and Iconic'. The winner of the Art Prize will be announced in the new year, as the exhibition of the participants run until February.

This year, the whole space even above the Forum is used in a very innovative way. The first art work is showcased already in the stairs going down into the basement, Between Desert Seas by Ayman Zedani, from Saudi Arabia. Can you spot it?

This is in fact an immersive multi-layered sonic experience. It's highlighting the human-non human relationship, especially in the seas surrounding the Arabian peninsula, through audio recordings of the humpback whales. This work is addressing climate changes and the recent environmental human disturbances that have caused the amount of whales to diminish.

 

The next artwork was completed here on site, just days before the inauguration of the exhibition! It's Break the Atom and Vegetal Forms (After Zeid), by Simrin Mehra Agarwal from India.

She takes inspiration from being a diver and a marine researcher, and she is really interested in war vessels that are buried in the sea and the new marine life that is created in them. It’s a multi-layered artwork both in form and meaning. 

This next one fascinated me, and I must admit, until I read the label properly I thought it was a typo, as it's called Camoulflage: The Fourth Pillar. It's by Zeinab Alhashemi, an artist from the UAE.
This is symbolising the transformation and the urbanisation of the UAE. You can see here the mix between the top half, the mesh and the camel hides: it’s half natural and half artificial. Alhashemi has done several of these artworks, always adjusted to the place where she exhibits, for example she has done another one in Egypt in the shape of an obelisk.

This is Weighing the Line by a local artist from Abu Dhabi, Afra Al Dhaheri.

Al Dhaheri reflects on hair, here represented by the ropes, as an important marker for social norms. She also lets the ropes symbolise invisible boundaries, and the knots and the tension of the ropes represent the struggle we might face trying to untangle societal rules.

Sidelines by Manal AlDowayan, from Saudi Arabia. This artist often includes handicrafts in her works, such as this one, which is inspired by the traditional weaving, and Sadu, of the Bedouin women. This work wants to put the spotlight back on these women, who lived through the modernisation of their country and in that got pushed from the center to the sidelines of their communities.

This next installation is site-specific, and it's called Standing by the Ruins and it's by Dana Awartani from Saudi Arabia. It is constructed to look like the traditional floors you find all over the Middle East, made up of geometric forms. The artist have not tempered the tiles, so this work will eventually crack, deteriorate and maybe even crumble completely during the course of the exhibition.

My favourite I think, are all these figures that make up Earthly Wonders, Celestial Beings. It's an ongoing artwork by Rand Abdul Jabbar. Originally she is from Iraq but she lives in the UAE.
All these different pieces in clay are separately embodying a different heritage, while they are all collectively in dialogue with each other. The artist takes inspiration from other museum pieces, mostly using forms that draw on Mesopotamian mythology and figuration.

Here's an artwork by a Brazilian artist called Elizabeth Dorazio, Xylophone. She has recycled pieces of wood, from different objects that have been discarded. Now she is bringing the material itself back to life by using it in this artwork, and she shows us that even though us humans can be extremely destructive, the laws of nature are still the strongest.

A Still Life of an Ever-changing Crop Field, by Shaikha Al Mazrou, from UAE. This is an artist really interested in minimalist and conceptual art, here taking the desert as an inspiration showcasing crop circles; and how these non-native shapes to the land of the UAE now fits into the landscape. 

I had the pleasure of meeting the artist of this piece, Vikram Divecha who is from Lebanon, but lives here in Abu Dhabi, the other week. He has created this piece Wall House which is a vision of a passion project of his. He is planning to extract walls from buildings that are getting demolished across the globe, something that proposes an "archiving of the present". The artwork also shows a movie from the very first extraction, of a wall saved from here in Abu Dhabi.