SYMBIOSIS | KARINE ROCHE


  • Artists : KARINE ROCHE 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 01 November 2017
  • Start Date : 01 November 2017 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 22 November 2017 Time : 10:00 PM

    SYMBIOSIS | KARINE ROCHE 
     
    The increase in urban populations and rising number of metropolises throws the whole questioning. The opposing definition of ‘City versus Nature' is an ambiguous one since a city is also part of the ecosystem and nature. Humans create by reflex faced with an environment's new living conditions to which they must adapt. Pollution of water, air and soil has triggered increased ecological awareness.
    The idea of harmony between a human habitat and the place of settlement is not new; organic architecture is a conceptual approach that links the building with its environment. This concept was developed at the beginning of the 20th century and still continues to exist and change with evolving knowledge in symbiosis.
           
    KARINE ROCHE’s paintings in SYMBIOSIS creates a cosmology in which nature returns to the city center. We can see how composition seeks an alternative rhythm through the network of organic and geometric lines of landscape that intermingle. Photographic views of various geographical locations are visual Karine’s memories that allow us to reconstruct imaginary landscapes. A high density of lines alternate with spaces; these voids are not absences but necessary pauses. In work, perspective is intuitive and acts like an illusionist’s tool to create depth. Thanks to this tool, rhythm is no longer only horizontal or vertical but actually gains a third dimension which absorbs our gaze and immerses it in a vision where urban and vegetal are complementary.
     
    The concept of 'City versus Nature' highlights the broader question of the vision of the future and the search for a better fit between our lifestyles and the environment. The latter would certainly help resolve ecological and social crises.
     

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    DESIGN | SUMMER EDITION


  • Start Date : 22 June 2017 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 20 August 2017 Time : 10:00 PM

    DESIGN | SUMMER EDITION

    DESIGN | SUMMER EXHIBITION presents a collection of limited edition gifts, perfect for any occasion, by internationally acclaimed designers. The designers include: Nathalie du Pasquier, Cedric Ragot, Ettore Sottsass, Georges Mohasseb, and Gaetano Pesce.

    Ettore Sottsass (b. 1917, Innsbruck, Austria – d. 2007, Milan, Italy)
    Known for his large oeuvre including furniture, jewelry, glass, lighting and office design, Sottsass was also one of the founders of the Memphis Group. His own work was known for its variety, often times incorporating playfulness through ornamentation and color. In 1959 he designed the first Italian electronic calculator and typewriter models such as Praxis, Tekne and Valentine, in which the latter is now part of the permanent collection at MOMA.

    Gaetano Pesce (b. 1939, La Spezia, Italy)
    During his 50-year career, Gaetano Pesce has worked as an architect, urban planner, and industrial designer. His outlook is considered broad and humanistic, and his work is characterized by an inventive use of color and materials, asserting connections between the individual and society, through art, architecture, and design.

    Georges Mohasseb (b. 1973, Beirut, Lebanon)
    Having been working as an architect and designer for sixteen years, Georges Mohasseb has developed a unique design approach that is identified by high level of craftsmanship and complex expression of materials.
    Thanks to his experimentation with materials and textures, he always looks for the best possible and most sensible combinations to execute his designs.

    Nathalie du Pasquier (b. 1957, Bordeaux, France)
    Artist and designer Nathalie du Pasquier moved to Milan in 1979, where she became a founding member of the influential and decade-defining Memphis Group, creating patterns for decorated surfaces, such as textiles and furniture. In 1987, she shifted her focus to painting, in which her work features geometric furniture, lamps, and the unexpected and energetic color relationship for which the Memphis Group is known for.

    Cedric Ragot (b. 1979, Dieppe, France – d. 2015, Paris, France)
    After graduating from the French National Institute for Advanced Studies in Design, Cedric Ragot founded his own design studio in 2002. With Eclecticism as his personal choice, he built a cross category approach of industrial design, getting involved into a broad scope of application fields. Mixing creative imagination and industrial reality, his designs associate with the functional aspect of an object a solid proposition in concept and image. 

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    PUT IT IN A TIN | MY CITY- WALL | ZENA ASSI


  • Artists : ZENA ASSI 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 23 May 2017
  • Start Date : 23 May 2017 Time : 5:00 PM TO 10:00 PM
  • End Date : 23 July 2017 Time : 11:00 AM TO 10:00 PM

    PUT IT IN A TIN | MY CITY-WALL

    Zena Assi moved from Lebanon to the UK in 2014. These series include her latest artworks produced in her London studio. The artworks draw inspiration from the emotional, social and cultural baggage we carry with us when we move from an environment to another.

    Facing a new culture makes you question your own. It tackles the identity issue and all the conflicts we are facing when we are rewriting our own story and narrative from tainted memories. 

    The first series, ‘PUT IT IN A TIN’, is a collection of big bouquets’ paintings. The canvas itself is treated as a carpet, laid on the floor for months and months. It witnesses footsteps and dust, used as a draft of rough ideas, a palette cleaner or a coffee holder... When time takes its hold on it, Zena stretches the canvas on a wooden frame and images start to appear through the layers of paint, like shadowy memories emerging from the past. The canvas, now, has its own story to tell and she only has to outline its imageries to be visible to the naked eye. Finally, Zena takes this bouquet and does what her grandmother did before her, and her mother before her, she puts it in a tin, so that the iron would sink into the soil and make the plants grow even stronger…

    The second series, ‘MY CITY-WALL’, reflects the relations and conflicts between the refugees/migrants and the cities they are aiming to get to. Through her work, for more than a decade now, she has been trying to visually translate the city life of our modern society. Zena believes that the structures we build, the architecture language we adopt, and the borders we draw, are all witnesses of our ideologies in one moment in time. They are the dialect history uses to write itself with. And now, unfortunately, we are witnessing the rise of walls again…

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    LONDON | SARA SHAMMA


  • Artists : SARA SHAMMA 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 18 April 2017
  • Start Date : 18 April 2017 Time : 01:00 PM
  • End Date : 20 May 2017 Time : 10.00 PM

    LONDON

    Sara Shamma’s “London” is her first new body of work since her relocation to the UK on being awarded a rare and prestigious Exceptional Talent Visa.

    The paintings draw their inspiration from her early experiences of the city as an artist and mother, and her insights on life as a settled resident, freshly welcomed into her local community. 

    This is a second move for Syrian-born Shamma and her young family, who in 2012 fled war in Damascus to the safety of her mother’s home country, Lebanon. This mingling of historical events and personal circumstance gave rise to works reflecting the experience of the individual in the face of collective catalysts to civil unrest and diaspora: phenomena of the artist’s time and place, but common to humanity throughout place and time. 

    Witnesses to physical and mental anguish, her paintings from this period trace the visceral imprints of terror on the body and its expressions. They are figurative evocations rather than portraits, composite characters drawn from real faces and bodies, through the filter of the artist’s mind’s eye. These works distil experiences of conflict, whilst touching on the imponderables of what gives rise to conflict in the first place.

    A regular visitor to London where she has exhibited on several occasions, Shamma arrived this time at the beginning of the academic year and was plunged headlong into the currents of British domestic and family life. Choosing a school for her children and settling herself into the close circle of parents, teachers and friends in her neighbourhood, Shamma’s most striking and immediate observations centred around the extraordinary contrast in attitudes between her children’s primary school classmates and their peers in the Middle East. Where a guarded deference still characterises relations between children and adults in that region, Shamma discerns a refreshing and joyful fearlessness and freedom in the way her children’s new friends relate to teachers, family and other authority figures, much more in line with the way that she herself (an exception due to the liberalness of her own upbringing) was brought up, and the spirit in which she and her husband have parented their two young children. 

    Shamma believes strongly that children who are encouraged to express themselves freely and without fear of reprisal, to be messy and embrace the full playful exuberance of discovery each day, will grow to perpetuate the values of peacefulness and freedom which form the strongest bulwark against civil strife. Happy children will beget more secure adults, who do not readily fall prey to becoming tools in the hands of those who would manipulate their grievances to destructive ends. Whilst they may not be a guarantee against violence and war, they are a prerequisite for democracy, and with it any hope for abiding peace.

    Shamma decided her first work in London should explore and celebrate the spirit of imagination and possibility embodied in the children she has met in these first months. 

    She invited them into her home to sit for a series of portraits which will stand as counterpoints, even antidotes, to her Q, Diaspora and World Civil War Portraits: a visual proposition of what a “good beginning” can look like. 

    During their visit to her studio, the children were given art materials to experiment with, and elements of the resulting paintings and drawings have been selected by Shamma and transposed onto the child’s portrait, integrating their nascent creativity into the work, and making it in a sense a collaboration, as well as a personal evocation of a particular and precious moment in these young lives.

    By reaching out into the community that has welcomed and given her new hope and inspiration, she is consolidating the city’s place in her work as well as her own place within it. To audiences in the Middle East, these paintings are an insight into a more liberal regime of childhood, but they function also as reminder to slightly jaded Londoners of conditions they take for granted, but which are by no means given and immutable. 

    The first paintings in this series will be exhibited at artsawa Gallery in Dubai, in April 2017.  

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    DREAM FACTORY | RYM KAROUI


  • Artists : RYM KAROUI  
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 16 March 2017
  • Start Date : 16 March 2017 Time : 01:00 PM
  • End Date : 16 April 2017 Time : 10.00 PM

    DREAM FACTORY

    The important aspect of Rym’s work resides in the perpetual questioning of the world that surrounds her.

    A borderline abstraction and faithful to the use of her favorite colors: Rym plays around surprising the other and questioning the spectator’s temporality by painted surfaces that reflect her own reality.

    It is in the characters dialog of the colored forms that she reveals the circus’ stake and craziness.

    Like the excitement of a hazardous discovery, like the liberation of a trapped intimacy, like the expression of a semi-human, semi-animalistic farandole. Rym says "I always have fun, in the eternal dream factory, my life."

    When she works, she tells their stories using a vibrant palette of colors, creating sensations that draw the viewer into a different world; a world filled with movement, spontaneity, optimism and laughter.

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    AVOCA-AVOCADO | GEORGES MOHASSEB


  • Artists : GEORGES MOHASSEB 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 21 February 2017

    AVOCA-AVOCADO

    GEORGES MOHASSEB, thanks to his experimentation of materials and textures, always looks for the best possible and most sensible combinations to execute his designs.

    The use of wood is always prominent and remains in many of Georges Mohasseb ’s designs due to its connectivity, liveliness and texture of this material. Georges has constant search for materiality and immateriality that characterizes his designing approach for a strong identity for all and each project he has developed. Either they are architectural, furniture and/or lighting design projects, Georges’s main concerns is to create a limited number of timeless designs maintaining a high level of craftsmanship and a complex expression of materials through their sensory experience including the color, shape, texture and smell as well.
    In Avoca-Avocado, Georges inspiration focuses on a form of the fruit, expressing a return to the natural and organic forms.

    The choice of the Avocado is by no means arbitrary but an inspiration at first by her smooth and appetizing form.

    The avocado is cut in half in order to flatten the top and include the seed in the mass and inlay it in a tinted resin with three solid brass rods supporting the whole. It is a curved shape reflecting light and creating a visual lightness. The colors chosen are rather neutral to better integrate in the places where the work will be laid.

    The exhibition will be Georges’ first exhibition in Dubai.

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    THE UNIVERSE IS A BLUE TREE | PINO DEODATO


  • Artists : PINO DEODATO 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 27 November 2016
  • Start Date : 27 November 2016 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 27 January 2017 Time : 10:00 PM

    THE UNIVERSE IS A BLUE TREE

    Small, very small, calm, quiet and lonely, these are Pino Deodato’s clay men, on view at artsawa Dubai gallery. Lonely characters are suspended in the exhibition space, almost forming a capillary network of correspondences, voices, cross-references, and each one somehow associated with the other’s loneliness.“The universe is a blue Tree ” is the title of the exhibition, as well as the central essence of a “tranquillitate animi” that pervades Deodato’s small men: to look for something that, you know, you’ll be finding sooner or later, without a care.

    The painted works in clay and bronze, together with a few experiments in pencil drawing on terracotta tile, contrast transient signs with firm material presence.The “rooms” where the small clay statues live allegorically exemplify, in a variety of ways, the means by which knowledge or wisdom is acquired, be it in a library or primordially infused, falling short total knowing. But maybe being content is enough, otherwise one would have to face the idea of never being able to achieve the real goal, or reach the finish line.

    Perhaps the continuous quest for wisdom, without the anxiety of trying to reach the highest peak, is knowledge too. No existential crisis haunts these normal men. Their familiar thoughts have been intimately unveiled. While singularly placid in their daily meditations, they seem resolute in the collective experience of existence.The artist reaches a sort of “humanized symbolism” by telling small stories - what is intimately personal can become symbolic. In Deodato's work every "tile" of men imbued in their thoughts adds to a mosaic of relationships that fill the exhibition space. Little by little something is revealed, but only to those who will search.

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    SENSUALITY & THE FEMALE BODY


  • Start Date : 24 October 2016 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 26 November 2016 Time : 8:00 PM

    “Sensuality & The Female Body” presents a selection of multi-media works by Mohammad El Rawas, Marwa Adel, and Zena Assi – each in their own way delving into personal and societal issues concerning the representation of sensuality and the female body.

    MY CITY SHORE | ZENA ASSI


  • Artists : ZENA ASSI 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 21 February 2016

    MY CITY SHORE

    Migrants and refugees news has lately captured the world’s attention with scenes of heartbreaking tragedy. Countries within this turmoil are re-drawing their borders yet again, new walls and fortifications have been erected, landscapes are utterly changing, bridges demolished, areas quarantined; all in the hope of containing these masses on the move.

    My City Shore, the latest series of works, is an attempt to put on canvas the landscape of a constantly shifting city shore, where the desperately sought after reality progressively merges with the surreal, loses its shape, and transforms into nothing but a mirage. The notion of a vibrant secure city haven is being exposed only to see what‘s beneath; it is fixed on a canvas only to witness its hollow prefabricated infrastructure.
    This body of works formulates an invitation to question how our cityscapes can subsist, materially, socially, as well as culturally, in light of such a colossal humanitarian crisis.

    More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, sparking a crisis as countries struggle to cope with the influx and creating division over how best to deal with resettling people.’
    BBC news- UK

    ‘The conflict in Syria, ongoing violence in Afghanistan… abuses poverty, insecurity, war, hunger are leading people to look for new lives elsewhere. Migration is driving people to use perilous routes, by boat and overland, often in flimsy rubber dinghies or small wooden boats.’
    The Independent

    ‘The movement of children and families across Europe is the largest since World War II.’
    The New York Times 

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    The exhibition presents a selection of affordable artworks by artists Karine Roche, Mustafa Ali, Ahmed Askalany, Rym Karoui, Wael Darwesh, and Hend El Falafly.

    ECLOSION | RYM KAROUI


  • Artists : RYM KAROUI  
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 15 September 2015
  • Start Date : 15 September 2015 Time : 07:00 PM
  • End Date : 27 November 2015 Time : 10:00 PM

    ECLOSION

    Art critics view Rym as an alchemist; the one who transforms the boldness of her graphic illustration into highly charged emotional works that tell stories so vivid they seem to strain against the limits.

    Rym’s works and many of her figures, stripped of folksy sentimentalism, seem to embody the essence of this great continent, stirring in us the awareness of a shared sense of humanity. The cast in Rym’s dramas (complex, eccentric figures, beautifully executed) engages each other and the viewers to an unexpected intensity. This sensation is reinforced when she liberated and gives to her characters a three dimensional life force. On the top these spindly, thrill-seeking characters, her sculptural works are reassuringly plump and bold.

    Speaking about her work, Rym says “My work is to deploy a procession of hybrid characters, extravagant, whimsical and fantastic that share a perpetual conflict of the forces of good and evil. I am certainly inspired by the world of cinema and science fiction, comic tales and games. I often see my sculptures as toys. My work is indeed an ongoing story where I tell myself and tell stories to others from another world. It is a perpetual quest for an intimate inner need that I release in my works. It is a kind of spontaneous writing. I try to reclaim a piece of reality by transforming the liking of the imagination.”

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    DIALOGUE DEGREE ZERO | PART II | SADDAM JUMAILY


  • Artists : SADDAM JUMAILY 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 04 May 2015
  • Start Date : 04 May 2015 Time : 07:00 PM
  • End Date : 16 June 2015 Time : 10:00 PM

    DIALOGUE DEGREE ZERO | PART II

    SADDAM JUMAILY is a contemporary painter living and working in Amman, Jordan.

    Jumaily graduated from Al Qassim University but was born in Basrah, Iraq. Jumaily’s paintings draw it’s essence straight out from his hometown, as in Arabic Basrah means "the seeing of everything" while in Persian (Bas-r?h or Bassor?h) means "where many ways come together".To the classical notion of painting Jumaily's works reveal themselves as traumatic entities as they reject their introduction to a conjunction of ordinary objects. On Jumaily’s work there is no narration. Instead, we become witnesses of scenes we don’t fully understand.

    According to the Quran the Djinn are the human’s nemesis. The female and sometimes plural (ex. Moroccan Mythology) word form of the race is Jnun, a word that also means delirium. For the human eye the Djinn are invisible unless they wish to reveal themselves. We can infer then that Arabia is traversed by an invisible version of itself, which Jumaily manages to reveal using his canvases as lenses that show us the uncertainty of the unseen opening a peephole through the Arabian beauty of the invisible.

    Jumaily’s paintings manage to transmit their rejection of an ordinary existence into their public by going beyond the academic notion of beauty and exposing themselves as real beings. Through them we can see on our image our own essence, which is more than what we were searching for in the beginning. They are what Lacan defines as “lamelle” in his four fundamental concepts, which is the mythical pre-subjective substance of the not-dead; or in other words the libido as an alien organ. Because of this, people that keep their distance from Jumaily’s works often do not realize that the paintings are all ready dominating them on their inside.

    Jumaily’s work uses fantasy as its subject matter. Speaking on terms of ideology, fantastic scenery behaves as opacity of the true horror on a situation. Hence his art manipulates the subjacent censorship in its watchers' subconscious to turn visible the radical, academic, and false fantasy of painting in contemporary art.Fantasy lays too on the images portrayed by Jumaily, which contain unstable scenarios and characters. They highlight the real horror and delirium of painting which exists outside of them and which is, that even on the contemporary age, the art world usually defines painting using realism (and even hyperrealism) as its main basis or parameter. Hence and sadly, art set painting free from realism through photography only to go back to it through photorealism.The problem is of course the human need (in Kant’s terms) for a synthetic imagination that can allow its watchers to recreate a form.

    Jumaily’s paintings disintegrate this notion and trigger a loss in the traditional notions of painting by showing a fictitious and nightmarish universe that lacks of an ontological sense, which is in fact not only the reality of his paintings, but the reality of painting itself.On a similar way in which the Lamassus at Dur-Sharrukin or Nineveh on his country do, Jumaily’s paintings collide different spaces. And just as these creatures are capable of crossing through different planes, Jumaily’s works seem to stand still and move at the same time while we’re observing them. It all becomes clear then, leaving no doubt on how just as his hometown, the works of Saddam Jumaily are the space where many paths collide.

    by Alonso Cedillo Mata

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    THE PRANK | WAEL DARWESH


  • Artists : WAEL DARWESH 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 16 March 2015
  • Start Date : 16 March 2015 Time : 07:00 PM
  • End Date : 25 April 2015 Time : 10:00 PM

    THE PRANK

    “The Prank “is the solo exhibition focusing on the creative process by the artist where he explores few philosophical questions in his work.Wael Darwesh creates preliminary drawings where he plays with lines, colors, and geometric forms moving on to what become semi abstract paintings constructed from his mind.The “PRANK” by WAEL DARWESH is the exploration that each individual - not society or religion - is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely.

    This form of Existentialism, the search for the meaning of happiness, in our human and daily lives and the constant questioning if life is really worth living, has been permanently recurrent in his works.Should we consider life “spontaneously”, as it comes? Or there is it some kind of a mirage with instantaneous pleasures that will fade quickly?Wael says, “We are always standing in the middle of the road trying to ascertain where the truth is. We may compromise to reach half way and end with incomplete dreams.”

    Wael ‘s latest body of works “The Prank “reflects constantly this state of mind, this questioning by the dramatic expression in the works, the “mise en scene”, a set up for the human figures and the selected colors of his palette as well.Wael Darwesh, the artist, is Egyptian whom participated amongst other international art events to The 55th Venice Biennale, Maldives Pavilion, and Venice, Italy in 2013.

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    AFFORDABLE ART COLLECTING


  • Artists : Collective Exhibition 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 14 January 2015
  • Start Date : 15 January 2015 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 12 February 2015 Time : 10:00 PM

    AFFORDABLE ART COLLECTING

    Artists: AHMED ASKALANY | HEND EL FALAFLY | KARINE ROCHE | MARWA ADEL | SADDAM JUMAILY | WAEL DARWESH

    All artworks on display will be priced at AED 5000 or less, and will cover a wide range of mediums; Such as photography, oil on canvas, mixed media, Giclee, Lithography, and sculpture.

    Kindly join us for this amazing and affordable selection.

    TREE OF LIFE | MARWA ADEL


  • Artists : MARWA ADEL 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 09 December 2014
  • Start Date : 09 December 2014 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 08 January 2015 Time : 10:00 PM

    TREE OF LIFE

    Since Adam and Eve were both sent down to the Earth because of the forbidden fruit, the endless story starts and will remain forever as the Tree of life story. Man and woman. What are they, and why, each alone and if together?

    How much they are alike and different? How much the differences are due to nature, how much to culture?

    This latest series of works, “Tree of Life” questions about the relations between men and women, and the fear, from the society and from failure, that stereotypes their relation.

    “Tree of Life” it is about what keeps men and women apart or together. “Tree of Life” expresses phases of love, confrontation, emerging, separation, self-confidence and being one. Marwa Adel’ s artworks combine carefully posed photographs of models with symbols of fragility such as leaves, flowers and or torn paper. Once again, Marwa used the bare human body as a metaphor for the thoughts and feelings hidden inside it. The anonymous characters in Marwa’s photographs appear fragile and lonely, and yet you can feel the sea of emotions surging within. Their bodies are exposed, yet they conceal their thoughts, desires and feelings. These works represent no one and everyone, hiding their identity and try to look like anyone else because they want to be accepted by society, but their tense bodies speak about how painful it is to hide the truth.

    Marwa Adel is a visual artist passionate about photography. Since the beginning of her career, Marwa has defied traditional norms by using pictures of the human body in her work. She has a Master’s degree in advertising and she is a Lecturer Assistant at the Faculty of Applied Art at Helwan University, Cairo. She has won many awards for her bold and powerful creations. 

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    GLIMPSES | CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN ARTISTS


  • Start Date : 20 November 2014 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 21 November 2014 Time : 10:00 PM

    GLIMPSES | CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN ARTISTS

    Artists: MARWA ADEL | MIREILLE MERHEJ | ZENA ASSI | SARA SHAMMA | HEND EL FALAFLY

    With a collection of 15 works from very promising artists, who are making an invaluable contribution to the growth of the Middle East Art scene, artsawa is delighted to invite you to explore the different issues and realities that drive the process of contemporary art creation in the Arab World.

    This selection is diverse, thought provoking, touching, and offers bold and palpable narratives.  These works bring different approaches, statements and visions but most importantly they represent a window into the creative energy and talent of five young female artists.

    Despite the current political and religious struggles of our region, not least of which is the continued harassment and suffering of the women and the threat to their future role in their respective societies, this selection is particularly relevant: it gives a voice to women, to artists, and acts as an antidote to the current situation, a rightful message of hope and courage, a homage to the region's rich and diversified creative expressions.

    Marwa Adel's photographs speak about the struggles she has faced in her own life. They express her desire to break free from the restrictions imposed on women by society and to be the person that she is rather than what society forces her to be. Her work is deeply personal, but it tells a universal story. Marwa’s artworks combine carefully posed photographs of models with symbols of fragility such as leaves, flowers and torn paper. Her wedding dress and veil also appear in the pictures as a reminder of bittersweet memories. She also adds digital textures, light effects and pieces of her calligraphic paintings to create beautiful, incredible sensual and eloquent compositions. The black and white colors of her works highlight the conflict between the real self of these women and the person they pretend to be. The recurring appearance of her wedding dress symbolizes her marriage which was the turning point in her life, and the impulse to rethink deeply her intimate self, her feelings and the objectives of her life.

    Hend El Falafl's pencil drawings on canvas are a mix of the strong realism of the Egyptian society to which she belongs with a very subtle and symbolic messaging. Hend explores through her intimate works the different emotions expressed by women, which find root in her daily life. She boldly uses the female form and body language to hint at the female condition. Her semantic use of facial expressions conveys a scene of meaningful silence. She uses hands, feet, clothes to reveal the repressive tensions endured by women in Egypt while simultaneously to offer a promise of hope.

    Looking at the paintings of Mireille Merhej from a distance, one instantly recalls the works of Jacques de la Villeglé, Mimmo Rotella and Raymond Hains among many artists who have adopted the iconic style of de-collage or ripped street posters. When you get closer to Mireille‘s canvases however, you discover when scrutinizing their surface material that her images are in fact painstakingly painted in acrylic and are not simply collaged or de-collaged torn printed posters and pages of color magazines. This leads us to place her work into the realm of photo-realism and brings to mind - in particular - Malcolm Morley’s photo realistic paintings from the mid-1960s which were drawn from mundane post cards of ships. Mireille’s work is not actually based on found images of torn street posters but on small collages, which she makes out of carefully chosen torn bits and pieces of pages from color magazines and comics books. Accordingly, the statement of Mireille’s works is not merely about the final visual outcome but also about the process of making them; this process underlines the differences between the “apparently” accidental act of tearing strips of paper to create an original collage on the one hand and the act of carefully working out the blown up paintings on the other. The adjoined and juxtaposed images and texts in Mireille’s paintings take us on a journey across time and pop culture: they mirror and invite you to her fantasy world and to her thoughts and statements about current society.

    More so than most artists based in the Middle East, Sara Shamma possessed an international reputation long before the work presented in this exhibition was made. However, because of the current situation in her native Syria, both tragic and dramatic as world now knows, the images shown here possess a special resonance, and possibly her most powerful work to date in what is unfolding a distinguished career. Underlying the images, which were made in two different phases those before and after her exile to her new home in Lebanon, there is a powerful and unmistakable feeling of anxiety – an emotion focused, one can read on the threat to her children, rather than herself. Though no over statement about this is made, one can read in the difference between the first works and those made after she moved to Lebanon, an allegory about the Syria's situation and deterioration. The more recent composition shows an even stronger emotional content.

    Zena Assi's contemporary work on canvas draws inspiration from the relations and conflicts between the individual and his or her spatial environment, society and surroundings. Zena uses various supports and mediums to document and explore the cultural and social changes of her city, its crowds and country. Her work takes shape in installations, animations, sculptures, and mainly paintings on canvas.

    We would like to resume the meaning of this collection as an invitation to a Journey into the contemporary Arab world through the lens of female artists.

    In conclusion we would say that Marwa's works conveys a powerful message to all other Arab women to be in a state of awakening of self-preservation through the search of truth about themselves, that Hend’s works reveals an optimistic vision of her society and its future, thirdly Mireille's humorous observation of her real world is narrated through a comic fantasy world, and Sara with her extremely bold work talks about her strong emotions and our collective anxiety for the people, the children and the future of our region. Last but not least, Zena's is about her concerns towards the human condition and its metamorphosis, and potential return to a state of darkness. 

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    DIASPORA | SARA SHAMMA


  • Artists : SARA SHAMMA 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 27 October 2014
  • Start Date : 27 October 2014 Time : 07:00 PM
  • End Date : 30 November 2014 Time : 10.00 PM

    DIASPORA

    Sara Shamma’s powerful and mesmeric painting, displayed to such effect in Diaspora at artsawa from 27th October, have won the artist an international reputation in recent years far beyond her native Syria. Shamma has been the recipient of major prizes in Britain and Australia and has participated in important international exhibitions in Britain, Germany and the U.A.E. In 2010 she was invited to become a United Nations World Food Programme ‘Celebrity Partner’.The paintings on show at Diaspora possess a special resonance and are perhaps the most powerful works she has created in the course of an already distinguished career. Half of them were created in Syria whilst the rest were made in Lebanon, where she and her two small children now reside.Shamma’s background makes her the prefect commentator for the troubled times in which she makes her work, and now based in the Lebanon having been displaced by the war from her native Damascus.

    The style of the canvases show a masterly and bold approach to painting which is almost three dimensional, with swirls and distorted passages adding an often nightmarish quality to otherwise realistic portraits of subjects including her children. One is immediately struck by an underlying and powerful sense of anxiety which pervades Shamma’s work and which is particularly pervasive when the paintings are viewed as a group.In their construction and use of narrative, the paintings call to mind the works of Goya and Delacroix and particularly Fuseli with his celebrated painting The Nightmare. There is also the obvious connection with the great ‘masters of war’ and history paintings such as Delacroix’s The Massacres at Chios, but herethere is a major difference - although Sara’s work is rooted in the effects of war her paintings are avowedly not ‘war paintings’.

    The noted Art Historian Edward Lucie Smith describes Shamma’s approach thus:
    She has also had the courage to react to and comment upon what is happening now, particularly the tragedy now unfolding in her native Syria. Her recent paintings are not in any way journalistic, but they resonate with the tragedy of the current situation in her country.Shamma’s influences go far beyond both the current political situation and the tradition of western painting however, Lucie-Smith also noting influences from both Latin American Art and the Sufi tradition of the Whirling Dervishes which are evoked in the swirling movement and distortion found in many of the works shown at Diaspora.In essence, Shamma’s paintings take us on a journey of displacement in an almost cinematic sense, conjuring up the films of Surrealist artists such as Dali and Brunel as they do so. One experiences this perhaps most powerfully in Shamma’s monumental series Q from 2011, that was exhibited in the Royal College of Art in London in November 2013, where the line of paintings which make up this series suggest both a queue of displaced people and the cells from the celluloid of a moving picture.

    These are paintings which have the power to draw you in, to move and unsettle you and as Lucie-Smith comments:
    Most people know the much-quoted Chinese malediction: “May you live in interesting times.” The impressive images exhibited here demonstrate that personal and public misfortunes, the high drama of those “interesting times”, do have the power to provoke the creation of major art.

    CATALOG

    THE DISTANCE | MUSTAFA ALI


  • Artists : MUSTAFA ALI 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 14 September 2014
  • Start Date : 14 September 2014 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 25 October 2014 Time : 10:00 PM

    THE DISTANCE

    Every time we have an encounter with Mustafa Ali’s work, we find ourselves in a world reflecting the source of human beings’ inner voices through space and form. In each wooden head, we read the story of a thinking mind, well conserved in a perfectly shaped mass, in order to not lose a single breath, of a feeling, stimulated by that moment. The moment where we have to see our reality as human beings, divided between the survival of our identity carved by culture and experience, life and death, ego and empathy. The head of wood could even draw what might be a land scratched by an eternal discussion driven by the sense and thoughts of belonging...

    CATALOG

    AND NOW… SHALL WE DANCE | AHMED ASKALANY


  • Artists : AHMED ASKALANY 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 17 March 2014
  • Start Date : 17 March 2014 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 18 April 2014 Time : 10:00 PM

    AND NOW… SHALL WE DANCE?

    Critics and art connoisseurs alike have already described Ahmed Askalany as one of the most unique and inimitable sculptors of his generation. Askalany's sculptures are characterized and remarkable by traditional aesthetic forms that place an emphasis on both structure and volume, but the volumes are distorted with a minimal head on a giant body.

    Askalany's subjects are usually simple human figures inspired and representative of his society in Cairo, and his works possess a profound nature and a sense of innocence alongside a state of isolation reflecting humor, frankness and candor. There is no specific formula that Askalany uses when creating his works of art, the final work often represents his emotions by becoming humorous or naïve but always with a tremendous poetic sensitivity, reflecting his observations and thoughts about his daily life. 

    “And Now… Shall We Dance?"" is an invitation and an interrogation; there is some truth, if a very limited truth, to the cries of the simple human nature. Time and again, Askalany set down images of a pre-civilized world, his Eden before the fall, a world inhabited by his musicians and dancers celebrating Life. This connection allows his sculptures to become unique and unmistakable, yet at the same time, does not stop him being thoroughly up to date. 

    CATALOG

    HAPPY LUCKY | ROBERT HAMMOND


  • Artists : ROBERT HAMMOND 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 17 March 2014
  • Start Date : 17 March 2014 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 18 April 2014 Time : 10:00 PM

    HAPPY LUCKY

    Happy Lucky is Robert Hammond’s newest iteration of his Visual Ritual conception.

    Robert explores contemporary allegories through the mechanics of modern interfaces and the modern visual realm.

    While most wall art is about surface, Robert’s work is intentionally about reflection. Accents of light travel across chamfered edges where metal and glass meet. Precision-engineered surfaces transform smiling faces of glass and steel into sumptuous simple motifs combined to obtain whimsical harmonies and resonances - isolating our perception to naivety, pattern, surfaces, textures and reflection and their relations. In place of brush or pencil - Robert’s art is drawn with thick 5-7cm metal profiles. The materials are all glossy and reflective - polished steel is inlaid and engineered into thick acrylic - creating flush surfaces - producing compound objects 7cm deep - that make up a whole. Distilling beauty from astute simplicity, bringing order to complexity Robert’s works reflect the modern urban world around us. 

    Elementary shapes, symbols, and smiling faces, are combined to obtain whimsical harmonies and resonances - isolating our perception to patterns, surfaces, textures and reflection and their relations Since his emergence, Robert  has transformed Pop Art, Conceptual, and Appropriation Art with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique aesthetic. In Robert’s work the hand of the artist is always once removed, leaving his art to stand apart of human character and touch. 

    Robert’s artworks rarely inspire passive responses, and this is one sign of the importance of his accomplishment - his art holds up a mirror to contemporary iconography, and familiar commercial aesthetics in search of an art he makes his own.

    CATALOG

    DISAPPEARANCE...CONTINUED | WAEL DARWESH


  • Artists : WAEL DARWESH 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 14 January 2014
  • Start Date : 14 January 2014 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 13 February 2014 Time : 10.00 PM

    DISAPPEARANCE...CONTINUED

    “The Disappearance...Continued” by Wael Darwesh is the exploration of the exhibition concept of “The Disappearance”, the exhibition held at The National Pavilion of the Maldives on 29th May 2013 till the 24th November. It was Wael’s first time exhibition in La Biennial di Venezia, showing 3 large size works.

    He uses large fields of flat solid color and mixed media to capture a fleeting moment in our pulsating memory and its influence on the soul. This visual experience attempts to explore the consequences on the collective memory and psyche of experiencing long periods of continuous change, inconsistencies, anticipation and suppressed actions. The absence of transparency, the inability to predict the next moment and the emergence of various predictions has led to many changes around us and inside us. At the end all are human emotions and experiences. These variables have created a great load on our memory and left alone the mental abilities to absorb or explain these changes. This visual sonata of solid planes of form and color blended with gold leaf and collage, using abstract figures that seem to dramatically perform roles in a theatrical background. It is a study of the influence of this certain incidence on the memory, more like the scratches on the walls of the soul.

    Working from life, photography and from imagination Wael Darwesh’s work is ever evolving, maturing and more than inviting. 

    CATALOG

    SEVEN SINS | HEND EL FALAFLY


  • Artists : HEND EL FALAFLY 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 16 December 2013
  • Start Date : 16 December 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 13 January 2014 Time : 10.00 PM

    SEVEN SINS 

    Seven Sins is a theme that addresses each and every one, but do we know exactly what is going on? The Seven Sins still reserve some mystery… Indeed, who would be able to list the seven deadly sins? And know their origin? The ambiguity and ambivalence of the Seven Sins make us realize that a single definition of the deadly sins cannot be found. They also tend to cancel each other: Pride compensates for Envy because to envy others is to recognize that they are lesser than. Lust and Greed are also contradictory… There is also the idea that a sin leads to other sins. All defects might be related to each other. Can we even say that every capital sin implies it’s opposite, and, vice and virtue are mysteriously related? That together they form humanity as the colors of the spectrum combined form the color white? Indeed, over the centuries, men, philosophers and poets gave different meanings to the same sin.
     
    Hend Al Falafly, through this most recent body of works “Seven Sin” presents us with her personal definition of the subject by narrating through a series of situations, expressions and highlights her constant questioning: ”What could push a man /woman to fall into sin, which is not without the man who over time has been and is still found in human sins?
     

    CATALOG

    UNFATHOMABLE | RAFAEL BARRIOS


  • Artists : RAFAEL BARRIOS 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 11 November 2013
  • Start Date : 11 November 2013 Time : 10;00 AM
  • End Date : 14 December 2013 Time : 11:00 PM

    UNFATHOMABLE 

    Rafael Barrios’ work has been characterized from the beginning by the alteration of the observers’ perceptive mental state, manipulating form with the intention of dislocating our convictions about what we believe to see. Barrios creates a territory where the laws of gravity do not exist, one in which objects rise freely over themselves and where volume moves into space. With this, he destroys our false beliefs about what is possible and we question our ties to that which is terrestrial. 
    Barrios has been recognized as one of the most revolutionary contemporary Latin American artists and creator of Virtualism, a movement that he himself describes as: “the creation of visually participative pieces and in the creation of dislocating events in our perception. Volume is virtually modified in form, depending on distance, the shifting position of the observer and the changes in light throughout the day”. 
     
    Rafael Barrios is a sculptor considered one of the mayor exponents of Latin American geometric art. His work is based on the alteration of our perceptive mental state, manipulating shapes with the purpose of dislocating our convictions of what we believe we are seeing, considering himself a generator of existential circumstances. Sculpture is the discipline he chooses to subject the observer into discovering a broader relation of his Universe, thus establishing new rules in the game of perception. 
     
    Of its many forms, Barrios’ oeuvre includes the creation of large-scale pieces for public spaces, where virtuality is magnified to monumental dimensions and urban contexts, transforming the space into a new visual experience.

    CATALOG

    I'D SETTLE FOR BEING ABLE TO SLEEP | MONDONGO


  • Artists : MONDONGO 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 04 October 2013
  • Start Date : 04 October 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 09 November 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    I'D SETTLE FOR BEING ABLE TO SLEEP

    This show marks yet another radical excursion into the possibilities of pushing sculpture in new directions. This series of constructed “floats” or expansive assemblages has a clear relation to a carnivalesque spirit but, at the same time, is also full of their characteristic appropriated imagery and acid social comment. 
     
    Mondongo has resorted to the fairy story on other occasions as a means of presenting an allegory of Argentinean society, picking up on the moral content of the Victorian children’s story but subverting it through classic postmodern strategies: irony and appropriation. One of their earlier series dealt with an endlessly multiplied Red Riding Hood who wandered the parks and Japanese gardens of the city escaping and perhaps provoking the threats of a lecherous male world. Their work always cuts and comments, parodies and imagines.
     
    On this occasion Manuel Mendanha and Juliana Lafitte have turned to a blending of two classic fairy stories: Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Both figures are emblematic of white purity and innocence and, as such, easy victims of postmodern irony. Juliana herself serves as a model for this figure. It is not a gratuitous gesture since Juliana herself emerged, as it were, from one of these problematic barrios. The figure juts out as a three dimensional bust but she is gradually being overgrown, literally taken over, by the villas miseries that surround her, so characteristic of the immense peripheral expanse of Gran Buenos Aires. She is set centre stage – a distant and self-contained image of the comforts of the bourgeoisie – but, at the same time, she is being contaminated and sullied by the spread of poverty. However, Juliana’s enigmatic smile also suggests a certain positive recognition of the chaotic and irrepressible energies of life in these barrios. Life in the megalopolis is increasingly becoming a conflict-zone between the rich and the poor, between those who have access to culture and consumerism and those who simply manage to survive.
     
    The appropriations invariably tie into the theme of the work at multiple levels.
     
    The putrid body of the hare might easily be found on the streets of the barrio but it also relates at a metaphorical level to their approach to art and its potential meanings. Their intention is to make the work intelligible to a wider public. The hare can, therefore, be seen as a reference to Joseph Beuys’s famous performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Beuys locked the gallery doors from the inside, leaving the gallery-goers outside, only able to observe the scene through the windows. Beuys had his head entirely coated in honey and gold leaf and began to explain the pictures to a dead hare, whispering to it in an apparent dialogue.
     
    This performance was the high point of Beuys’ development of a broadened definition of art, which had already begun in his drawings of the 1950s. He ironically celebrated the ritual of “explaining art” with an action that was, for his viewers, effectively silent. The relationship between thought, speech, and form in this performance was characteristic of Beuys. Obviously Mondongo not only appropriates the image of the hare but also its broad symbolic meanings in many religions. In Greek mythology it is associated with the goddess of love, Aphrodite, to the Romans and Germanic tribes it is a symbol of fertility, and in Christianity it is connected with the Resurrection. Beuys has said of this piece: “For me the Hare is a symbol of incarnation, which the hare really enacts- something a human can only do in imagination. It burrows, building itself a home in the earth. Thus it incarnates itself in the earth: that alone is important. So it seems to me. Honey on my head of course has to do with thought. While humans do not have the ability to produce honey, they do have the ability to think, to produce ideas. Therefore the stale and morbid nature of thought is once again made living. Honey is an undoubtedly living substance – human thoughts can also become alive. On the other hand intellectualizing can be deadly to thought: one can talk one’s mind to death in politics or in academia.” This remark of Beuys offers a possible reading of regeneration from putrefaction, of a certain optimistic hope that things can improve despite all the evidence. Mondongo frequently appropriate imagery from their own immediate circle of family and friends and the image of their daughter Francesca stretched out on the ground seems like another injection of positive energy that acts as a counter force to encroaching strangle-hold of the villa miseria.
     
    The fact that Juliana’s head rests against a pressed meat cushion carries reverberations both of an earlier series of portraits, such as the one of Lucien Freud’s Leigh Bowery, and of the proliferation of cheap and often expired food. And this multilayering of meanings that is so much a part of their work also allows us to read the image as referring to Argentine’s history of meat production that has so often been the bulwark of their economy. Mondongo willingly complicates the referential field and the image of the hare is equally indebted to a Brueghel image where characters are seen eating or vomiting fish. And similarly the small-scale skull reminds of a recent series where the skulls served as repositories for a fecund and garrulous imago mundi of appropriated images from infinite cultural sources. The fact that the skull is ironically capped with an image of a turd suggests either that the series is definitely over or that, contrary to Beuys, their minds are void and that momentarily they feel threatened by a loss of ideas: a sudden burst of existential angoisse. 
    This is an important work that is taking Mondongo into new territory. It courts both spectacle and surprise. It remains much more ambiguous than the blending of the two fairy stories! 
    By Kevin Power

    CATALOG

    DIALOGUE DEGREE ZERO | SADDAM JUMAILY


  • Artists : SADDAM JUMAILY 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 01 September 2013
  • Start Date : 01 September 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 03 October 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    DIALOGUE DEGREE ZERO

    Saddam has participated previously in various thematic group exhibitions. His unique style is both raw and captivating and deals with transforming the mundane and routine into something dynamic, and out of the ordinary with his painting.  Saddam's external representations are reflections of his inner life, his paintings are filled with strange animal like, dream-like forms. This" inner self" deconstruction is externalized through various forms that hovers consistently throughout his work and he would argue around us in real life, following us wherever we may be in our day-to-day activities and moods. This September, Saddam with this exhibition will mark a turning point as he fills the entire gallery with major new and interesting outworks.

    While his technique is an important part of both the visual and conceptual behind his work, these pieces on their own exist in an imaginary world. The composition of the pieces is dictated mainly by strong characters and as a leitmotiv the apparition of a strange symbolic animal.

    Saddam was born in Iraq, and currently lives and works in Amman, Jordan. Saddam is an active painter, curator and graphic artist, successfully maintaining a strong and recognizable style in all his works. Speaking about his works:

    “The thing, I would like to do. I will not drag the idea by its collar in order to place it in a frame, I leave the garden door open for any idea to come hungry and chew the grass lovingly. Then it becomes a shining life in a frame, it gets rest and sleeps under a tree. I will not over-power painting with my thinking; the idea is there in its general form like a dropped stone on a footpath. There is a deep idea like a young star; it is the idea of painting itself. Painting is an idea, a creature that we cannot ride like a horse; it is more sacred and present in us, wider in imagination and in dream it will land like a butterfly. I will leave the window open for its sake to come in, bringing several creatures. It might come in the form of an alien creature – no matter! Bottom line it has to come without a rope, without stings, virgin, wild, absolute, pure and honest. Painting says what we cannot hear.

    What are our diaries? How can we transcribe them?

    There is always something deeper, something essential in our life that drops its shadow in the rooms of our soul, we stare at it, it stares at us. It cannot hear what we are saying. It whispers words that we cannot hear. It pants and perspires it is close and touches our life, something strange, obsessive, peaceful, lovely, it has an excessive presence, lively intense like a dream of water in the life of a fish. We miss what it means. It doesn’t feel our fears, going down the steps of our days, going up the stairs or our souls, slowly. We smell its strange odor, it smells our presence. It makes us consider our existence and destiny, the fact that there is an alien creature inside each of us. A creature that doesn’t necessarily have two legs, a nose or a tongue but it is present and dominates our life.”

    CATALOG

    CHROMATIC LANDSCAPES | KARINE ROCHE


  • Artists : KARINE ROCHE 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 02 May 2013
  • Start Date : 02 May 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 28 May 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    CHROMATIC LANDSCAPES

    The choice of a specific theme, the nature and the city, allow us to forget about the subjects in order to focus only on the painting itself. City and architecture are both the natural environment; there is no opposition, no contradiction... City lines and those of the vegetal world are multiples. Their combinations are infinites. Labyrinthine landscapes and urban structures are representing a globalized city. Before being a final image, the canvas is an abstract thought where forms are only lines, materials and colors. Doors and windows are white squares on a blue background and the canvas does not express a clear idea but more of an impression: The city, cities, noise, the people behind the colors, flows and networks, accumulation of activities that is giving stun sensations as being in a jungle. Lines are crossing to end up lost in a ghost horizon. Perspectives lines are false and buildings are incomplete, the city is an expanding universe going beyond the Framework. The technique used is oil painting. Colored maroufled fabrics on some paintings are memories of places and people, either given, either found or purchased on markets here and abroad. They intervene on the matter, pucker, creating lines and shapes on the canvas between hazard and constraint. By a reserve effect, colors and prints of fabrics are becoming splashes of color as well as those being done with the brush. There is photography on other paintings. The inclusion of photography leads to another representation of the reality. The photos are the starting point and framework of the painted image, being at the same time a reference and a memory of another place. Karine goes inside her personal landscape between mental and sensitive, emotional and evocative. She seeks herself through her representation. 

    CATALOG

    COLLECTIVE VIEW | WAEL DARWESH


  • Artists : WAEL DARWESH 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 18 March 2013
  • Start Date : 18 March 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 23 April 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

     COLLECTIVE VIEW

    artsawa is proud to present in the exhibition “Collective View” by Wael Darwesh.
     
    “In the past few years I have been much concerned with the changing perceptions and the state of continuous social metamorphosis that Egypt has witnessed in the last three decades. In my mixed media projects, I try to probe several phenomenon that constitute for me some permanent obsessions, like time, its relevance to the subject matter employed, elements of migration, gender, identity, among other themes that attract several Egyptian artists of my generation. Technically, I apply assemblages to create installation/ sculptural states that transcend simple two-dimensional art forms; through the studied and experimental use of collage I combine colour, calligraphy, textile, and various textural media to explore issues of space and passage of time.” explained Wael. 
     
    Wael Darwesh’s previous painting projects in the past few years were inspired by American Colour Field painting and French Lyrical Abstraction, where large “fields” of flat solid colour colonize harmoniously large areas of the canvas to create a homogenous surface of flat picture plane, stressing on the overall consistency of form over the brush movement and brushstrokes. Contrary to standard Colour Field and Lyrical Abstraction, Wael for years has successfully combined abstraction styles and painterly techniques with elements of figuration and cognitive representation. 
     
    Wael Darwesh reached the boiling point in his latest works. Although he tried to remain calm, questions kept creeping up in his head; questions without answers crammed themselves before his eyes. 
     
    Often to keep hope alive, only self-deceit was the option, the only way to stay alive. 
    Ultimately, avoiding reality seemed the only choice to avoid perishing in anger. 
    Beside these issues, Wael considered Art is his profession and this establishing a strong connection with the political situation, with political dialogue and discourse. His Art provides a visual drama often including glimpses of the real world through photographs, as eye-witness to actual events. 
    Wael’s series of works reveal the poetic beauty that can result from painstaking manipulation and this collection is a pure joy. 

    THE UNIVERSE & ME | ANACHAR BASBOUS


  • Artists : ANACHAR BASBOUS 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 18 March 2013
  • Start Date : 18 March 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 23 April 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    THE UNIVERSE & ME

    Anachar Basbous as a child preferred playing with magnetic boards to regular clay modeling. In adulthood, that preference for building-up rather than carving stayed with him. Nowhere is that clearer than in his latest body of work. Seemingly moving parts, almost floating in space create the illusion of constantly changing and dancing shapes. “I like to start from simple, pure shapes; a square, a rectangle, a disc, or a lens…” he says, “the shape is the beginning of my inspiration.” Most importantly his work is driven by his fascination with and the relationships between his sculptures and sunlight. His works pierce space upwards, like big astral machines in a perpetual dialogue with the sun, his sculptural works becoming pure reflection, the dialogue between nature and architecture, gravity and magnetism, the macrocosm and the microcosm, the body and the spirit, between man and the Cosmos. 

    CATALOG

    BUG SOLDIERS | ZENA ASSI


  • Artists : ZENA ASSI 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 18 March 2013
  • Start Date : 18 March 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 23 April 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    BUG SOLDIERS 

    Regardless of any analysis, judgement or speculation concerning the Arab Uprising; regardless of all the tens of thousands of pages written on the matter, debating it, endorsing it, or doubting it; the common man’s reality remains intact. The common man unwarned, unprepared, sometimes unwillingly is being dragged from his regular daily job or routine and shoved into an unrehearsed, unimaginable condition transformed into a soldier, a sniper, a killer and a victim, without prior formulation, military training or psychological aptitude to face the horrific violence of such turbulences. We, the outside borders’ world, simply hear the news about the injured, the raped and the killed day after day… Until somehow we get accustomed to the numbers of the victims, who in turn and over time are transformed inside the mind of the masses into mere numbers, their individual lives lose their usual value, they die in the hundreds, then the thousands… They take less and less space in the world media. As time passes, and with this phenomenon of no tangible reaction from the world watching from a distance, no real interference to stop the bloodshed, the human nature gets accustomed to the unfairness, the brutality, the misery and the violence… And these men turned soldiers, start growing on their backs a fragile insect wing. A metamorphosis occurs, a slow mutation takes place and they become insignificant bug soldiers, with their numbers as their only strength.
     
    Are we witnessing Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Golding’s Lord of the Flies? Are we observing the frightening parody of man’s return to the state of darkness from which it took him thousands of years to emerge, or is it only a transitory moment of disintegration under the pressure of raw nature?

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    PULLMAN | ART NIGHT

    Artists: ZENA ASSI | KARINE ROCHE | AHMED ASKALANY | AHMED AL BAHRANI |

    Under the patronage of His Excellency the French Ambassador Mr Alain Azouaou
    artsawa takes great pleasure in announcing their partnership with Pullman.
    The relationship demonstrates the commitment of the hotel to the on-going development of art within the region.

    The four artists “Ahmed Askalany, Ahmed Al Bahrani, Zena Assi, and Karine Roche” have been carefully selected to showcase the creative talent of Dubai and reflect the city’s unique spirit.

    artsawa is proud to partner with Pullman that will be part of Dubai’s thriving art scene now and in the future.

    AFFORDABLE ART COLLECTING


  • Artists : Collective Exhibition 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 23 February 2013
  • Start Date : 23 February 2013 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 27 February 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    AFFORDABLE ART COLLECTING

    Artist: AHMED ASKALANY | KARINE ROCHE | MARWA ADEL | MOHAMMAD EL RAWAS | WAEL DARWESH | ALI RAZA | SUMAYYAH AL SUWAIDI | SALEM DABBAGH | HANI ALQAM | ALI HAYDAR

    All artworks on display will be priced at AED 5000 or less, and will cover a wide range of mediums; Such as photography, oil on canvas, mixed media, Giclee, Lithography, and sculpture.

    Kindly join us for this amazing and affordable selection.

    NOSTALGIA | MIREILLE MERHEJ


  • Artists : MIREILLE MERHEJ 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 04 February 2013
  • Start Date : 04 February 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 14 March 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    NOSTALGIA

    “Looking at the paintings of Mireille Merhej from a distance, one instantly recalls the works of Jacque de la Villegle, Mimmo Rotella and Raymond Haines among many artists who have adopted the iconic style of de-collage or ripped street posters. When we get closer to Merhej’s canvases however, we discover when scrutinizing their surface material that her images are in fact painstakingly painted in Acrylic and are not simply collaged or de-collaged torn printed posters and pages of color magazines. This leads us to place her work into the realm of photo-realism and brings to mind -in particular- Malcolm Morley’s photo realistic paintings in the mid-sixties which were drawn from mundane post cards of ships.

    Mireille's work is not actually based on found images of torn street posters but on small collages, which she makes out of carefully, chosen torn bits and pieces of pages from color magazines. Accordingly, the statement of Mireille's works is not merely about the final visual outcome but also about the process of making them; this process underlines the differences between the “apparently” accidental act of tearing strips of paper to create an original collage on the one hand and the act of carefully working out the blown up paintings on the other. The adjoined and juxtaposed images and texts in Mireille Merhej’s paintings take us into a journey across time and Pop cultures: they mirror the worlds in the eye of the artist who is inviting us to escape from the burden of our mundane and stressful environment and visit her Pandora’s Box of la Dolce vita” 
    Mohammad El Rawas-2012
     
    “In my works, I try to transform scattered images floating in my mind into an interesting work of art”, she said. It is her ability to convert imagination into something more real which lies at the basis of her art; it is her attempt of putting back together all those personal and nostalgic memories into an acceptable form like putting together a broken piece of pottery, knowing that traces of fractures will always remain. Mireille admires her past and cherishes what it contains. She finds it inspirational, mystic, each one of the images she selects is related a story whose importance has not faded to her. 

    CATALOG

    FACELESS | MARWA ADEL


  • Artists : MARWA ADEL 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 13 January 2013
  • Start Date : 13 January 2013 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 15 February 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    FACELESS 

    Marwa's photographs express a desire to break free from the restrictions imposed on women by society, to be the persons they are instead; unique and different.
    Marwa maintains a very personal voice as her work is unique in tackling the taboo of the human figure, expressing revolt of social restrictions. Her texts, taken from her own diary, confirm her visual message.
    "Each woman is different and that is what makes her unique... Each one has her own journey and her own life. No one is like anyone, yet our societies oblige to hide ourselves and in turn we lose our real identities and become only their image of her… each woman has her own life....”  
    Through her works, Marwa recommends not to avoid confrontation and to always reveal who truly women are no matter of the social and professional environments.  
    “Express to make your society hear, feel and understand you.....When you find your life, you find your identity."

     

    CATALOG

    FLOWER POWER | ROBERT HAMMOND


  • Artists : ROBERT HAMMOND 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 27 November 2012
  • Start Date : 27 November 2012 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 10 January 2013 Time : 10:00 PM

    FLOWER POWER
     
    At the center of the Flower Power exhibition is a collection of flower pieces – a kaleidoscope of arcs juxtaposed with hatched backgrounds – melodied with a rainbow of colors. Flower Power is the latest iteration of Robert Hammond’s Visual Ritual conception. Visual Ritual is about strengthening our perception to patterns, surfaces, textures and reflection – emphasizing their properties. At the core of the Visual Ritual conception is the notion of line – how they focus, lead, and drop off the eye. Robert Hammond’s work is an interface of signals, which guides and activates, it seeks to crystalize everyday our ways of seeing, by simplifying illusion, outline, movement and abstraction.
     
    Sparing, cool and deliberately void to context, Robert Hammond’s work is bold, elegant and alluring – a presence hard to ignore.

    CATALOG

    DRESS CODE PROJECT


  • Artists : Collective Exhibition 
  • Venue : CAP KUWAIT
  • Preview : 21 November 2012
  • Start Date : 21 November 2012 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 04 January 2013 Time : 11:00 PM

    DRESS CODE PROJECT
     
    Artists: NERMINE HAMMAM |RACHIDA AZDAOU |SAMTA BENYAHIA |SUMAYYAH SUWAIDI |GHASSAN ALI GHAIB |FATMA BUCAK |MARYA KAZOUN |FADI YAZIGI| MAHMOUD AL OBAIDI |ZENA ASSI AND ISSAM BARHOUCH |NAIZA KHAN |AHMED AL BAHRAN
     
    In 1996, the art critic Germano Celant committed the resources of the city of Florence in a large Biennial, whose title was Time and Fashion, which aim was not only to compare but, for the first time, to involve art and fashion in the same projectuality, treating the two dimensions in exactly the same way as creative entities capable and responsible to constantly articulate a thinking and an innovative synthesis about the world and contemporary reality. The choice, quite amazing at that time, violated a deeply rooted and consistent taboo of the idealist thought, “confirmed” by the famous and oft-cited joke of one of the best fashion designers ever, Coco Chanel: “Fashion is what you like immediately, but not tomorrow, art is what you do not like right away but you’ll like tomorrow. “In other words, quoting the same Chanel, “fashion passes, style remains”. Fashion and art had always been treated, so to say, as opposite entities: ephemeral, commercial and consumerist the first one, essential, universal and tend-to-be “eternal” the second one. In short, “true” values against “fake” ones.
     
    Celant however, in full coherence with the brilliant situation that the “Made in Italy” was going through at that moment, spoke in favor of a different dimension, both for fashion and art: by making the first down from its traditional pedestal and immersing it in a virtual space for communication and exchange of forms and values far more lively and incisive than the old fashioned museum, and offering to the second unexpected and unusual opportunities of celebration and appreciation. In essence, “contaminating” museums with works by fashion designers, from Moschino to Calvin Klein, by inviting artists to produce art works-dresses (as did, for example, Rosemarie Trockel and Jan Fabre, who presented his disturbing clothes made of beetles) and, finally, engaging artists and designers to work together in pavilions designed by four hands.
     
    This event, which has remained a one-off, made history: from that moment it was established a kind of osmosis between fashion and art, plans and prospects for joint discussion and joint actions, which could have affected the very nature of the “person” at a time when distinguish between “natural and artificial, between mind and body, between physical and a-physical” was and has become very difficult if not impossible. Today, with Dress-Code, the challenge that, in his time, was taken up by Celant, is taken again and adapted to very different time and situation: This project, conceived by Amel Makkawi as an open invitation, to artists and professionals active in the Arab world and vicinity, to create an artwork in form of dress, raises once again the strategic alliance between art and fashion culture, setting it in an area of the world especially critical and sensitive to the communicative poignancy of these two signifiers together.
     
    Dress, in fact, in the Arab world or, more generally, in the Islamic world, rather than fashion, choice, freedom of expression, contamination of languages, is a word that shows ties with the tradition, with the concealment, the repression of the body - especially the female body. But “dress” in the East, far more than in the West, is a word that contains also sophisticated and complex symbolic connotations and religious affiliation, reported by styles, shapes, colors and fabrics.
     
    The East, in fact, is precisely the realm of tissue, the place - the combination of places and spaces and traditions - where tissue culture has been more and more deeply varied: among “ikat” and “suzani”, among embroidery, damask work, brocade and lace works, among precious silks and satins and cottons, and endless variations of working, textures, colors, braids and knots.
     
    The East, in short, is the realm of textile and consequently of dresses: it is also with this huge legacy that the artists who have joined this project had to confront; the realization of which has needed about a year of very careful work and accurate selection of proposals.
     
    But we must not imagine that “art work in form of dress” has resulted in the production of wearable objects that reflect the pattern of “Dress Code”. This pattern, for the participants, was simply a memory, an empty container, an elastic theme. Their works, indeed, cover all the techniques and forms of expression: from collage to multimedia, from video to photography to installation ... to “dresses”, but not conceived to be wearable.
     
    Expression: from collage to multimedia, from video to photography to installation ... to “dresses”, but not conceived to be wearable. The protagonists of “Dress Code” are twelve: all together they cover a vast area of cultures and countries, extended from Algeria to Pakistan and from Turkey to Egypt to the Emirates, via Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. This is already in itself a meaningful result, and a sign that the project has aroused interest and that a variety of extraordinary pieces have been produced, which reflect, of course, first of all the individual creativity (they are indeed “art-works” in the full sense), but also the experience of each person, the difficulty of the daily existence, the experience of conflict, violence, but also the inspiration of beauty and, last but not least, the sexism, male-female relationship, an especially delicate topic which does not surprise to find regarded and treated with particular focus and dedication from the artists, especially the women-artists.
     
    Women -artists: as it often happens, it hits here too the happy exuberance and creativity of women artists of the Arab world, who are capable of comprehensive responses and incisive, relevant, timely, and lucid interventions. Their works focuses on sensuality and sexuality, but it also proves to be a powerful tool for introspection, for narrative and even for a declared, stinging irony.
     
    This is the case of Naiza Khan, who presented two objects, a corset and a belt full of not too hidden references to the object which was known as “chastity belt”. Objects “between love and war,” as she puts it: objects made of hard metal and strong, masculine fiber leather, equipped with aggressive protrusions and attractive zippers, but in any case “dresses” that evoke an armored, defended, seemingly inaccessible body, but also a body who is provocative, ambiguous and terribly sexy.
     
    Marya Kazoun has enriched her Baroque and fleshy dress of a number of existential elements that accompany, not without anguish, a woman’s life: sex, childbirth, the sprawling and almost suffocating wrapping that can characterize the relationship between mother and daughter; and finally, death and decomposition. Her dress is impregnated with moods and reminiscent of some anti-form experience, for example by Eva Hesse.
     
    Fatma Bucak has used for her dress a heavy synthetic rubber characterized by a shiny surface that reflects the world and protects the body, placed inside as if in a kind of cocoon. The shape of this dress is typical of the one worn by the archaic Greek “Kore” (maids), covered, yes, but always provided of an individual and unique face. On the contrary, this synthetic and heavy dress denies the face – also the placement “backwards” of the dress avoids the define, any connotations and even the sexual references. The dress makes us whatever, that is all, that is nobody.
     
    Nermine Hammam has used the strong emotions of the Egyptian revolution of last January, to produce a work in which references cross and multiply each other: on one hand the Iranian miniatures, a quintessential traditional artistic practice, on the other the ideal warrior, a revolutionary centaur. Camouflage overalls, tiny feet rooted to the ground, Frida Kahlo’s memories, traditional Arab patterns, in other words, an efflorescence of contradictions and at the center of it all, inevitably, a self-portrait (because it is only by ourselves, from our limited and partial point of view that we get experiences and emotions).
     
    Rachida Azdaou has woven a dress, simple in appearance, with strips of white tape, synthetic and almost transparent, marked by irregular patterns of metal wire. A dress which is thin, fragile, delicate but artificial. A sensitive suit that, supposedly, heals deep wounds. A dress unpretentious, designed as therapy for a world too hard and pressing.
     
    Samta Benyahia is presenting on this occasion two dresses made of plastic material, very “feminine” and inlaid with all the precious appearance of traditions of the desert. Her work, in general, is based on the relationship between transparency and decoration, between inlay and light. The dress, transparent, has been made   solid and plastic thanks to ancient decorative shapes used all over the Arab world. Blue color on emptiness, gold on blue: the decorative forms evoke ancient traditions, rituals and timeless symbols. The dress becomes a kind of virtuosity, an exercise of lights and shadows, solid and void, inlay and transparency: totally traditional and totally original.
     
    Sumayyah Suwaidi uses the pattern chosen for Dress Code as an ideal screen for projecting a problematic relationship, yet smiling, between a double idea of the   self: an intimate inner-self and a decorated, even plumed with peacock feathers outer-self. Because, the dress is also this: a diaphragm, the threshold of dialectic of existence.
     
    Zena Assi and Issam Barhouch have worked together: their intervention consists of two dresses, very different from each other, the first dedicated to the city of Beirut (My city my puppet) and the second to an original raw material made by the shining, “golden” face of hundreds of bullet - a stunning reinterpretation of the “metal” clothes designed in the eighties by Italian designer Gianni Versace. Beirut: an extraordinarily fascinating and contradictory city, as the situation of Lebanese women. Free, in fact, according to law but not in fact, free apparently but not substantially. The “City” dress is a patchwork of contradictory and spurious images, of partial images and graffiti, which seem to contradict each other, attached to the shoulders of the hypothetical model not as expected, with strips of cloth, but with chains. On the other hand, the second cloth, Bullet Points, is an elegant evening dress, for a dress all in gold. The sophisticated style and brilliant appearance speak in favor of an evening gala, a circumstance of great impact and splendor. The raw material, however, are large caliber bullets, dangerous, even deadly offensive elements, woven together by an elegant copper wire. “The Arab woman is in fact treated as an object” confirm the two authors. Their idea was to “create a dress made of shiny golden dots, conveying a glittery luxurious vision of an icon from afar that takes a completely opposite dimension when one gets a closer look and realizes that the golden dots are in fact the heads of bullets”.
    Male-artists too have expressed strong narratives through works of great expressive power, and often poignant relevance. Beginning with Ahmed Al Bahrani, whose suit of steel, riddled by hits of anonymous bullet, without reasons or mandators, contains a clear reference to the tragic situation of Christian minorities in Iraq: to the essential equality of all men, the artist comments, it is superimposed a dress, a surface immediately mystified as “identity.” And it is the dress that one shoots, it is the dress that one tries to kill but it is the person who dies under the dress.
     
    Fadi Yazigi emphasizes the protective function of the cloth, which protects a fragile body from insults and attacks of reality and society. His work, though softened by the beautiful painted panels that descend like a sumptuous cloak along the foot of the bust and of the large skirt, is more reminiscent of a cage that a dress: even from the collar comes out a kind of suffocating hood. An unlivable dress.
     
    Mahmoud Al Obaidi puts his person at the center of a review of the precariousness of any identity connotation conveyed by clothing. In his video, constituted through a sequence of images of himself, half-length, images very similar to those used by police to file or detainees suspected of any crime, he wears a set of clothes / costumes that tackle his identity. To be someone else, just strip and change dress.

    Ghassan Ali Ghaib made two dresses, significantly titled Home Industry. In both cases, they are made of recycled, recovered material, reintegrated with difficulty in the movement of commodities and of meanings of the world. In the first case, where “production” is completed, we are dealing with a suit of chain, supported by straps of old wood that evokes the unfortunate palm trees of the Iraqi desert. In the second case, the production is still in progress: from an old sewing machine is emerging the dress on which it is printed a map of Iraq, all furrowed with tears and zippers. It is not certain yet whether the stitching will proceed to the end and pleats along the edges of this devastated country, or if the parties shall stand and the skirt will be split permanently from the bodice. The work is still in progress.
     
    Almost a conclusion: it is more clear than ever that today’s social arrangements, both those from  the Eastern as those from the Western world, are breaking up under the influence of ethnic, religious, industrial, cultural and economic factors. Day by day, we increasingly seem to find ourselves at the terminus of a great dream - the end of a developmental model. In this twilight, or perhaps dawn, still plays a dramatic role the great conflict between humanism and technology: a lot of humanity is left behind, on the road, losing, over and over again, its values. It is urgent, more urgent than ever, that culture and art participate in redesigning the clothes for the new humanity. The one that, in this morning not free from anxiety is awakening.
     
    By Martina Corgnati

    CATALOG

    MONDONGO | MONDONGO


  • Artists : MONDONGO 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 16 September 2012
  • Start Date : 16 September 2012 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 28 October 2012 Time : 11:00 PM

    MONDONGO

    "The play's the thing"

    Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 603-605  

    For cultural iconoclasm, playful irreverence and magpie bohemianism, there are few to beat Mondongo, the art collective from Argentina. 

    This feature that marks them out starts ab initio, or from the very beginning of their existence.

    The trio, who make up Mondongo, first looked into the kitchen to give a name to themselves. Their muse was “Mondongo,” the word for the traditional Argentine tripe stew.

    Mondongo is not only partial to the name of the stew, but make their work from a cauldron of ingredients. “We’ve used a huge variety of materials in our art, depending on what best reinforces the concept of the work,” says one of them.

    “It’s always a process of experimentation until we finish it. We’ll keep experimenting with materials till death comes!” Or they run out of material, both possibilities which don’t seem anywhere near. Just about everything – we mean everything – is grist to their feverish art making imagination. 

    The material they use for their mixed media art include burnt toast, stale bread, resin, gold chains, nails, clay, velvet, coloured sequins, cookies and bullets. This wide variety of mediums they use give them leverage to create an astonishing range of art results. They helped the artists burnish their works with vivid colours, subtle nuances and that often provide a three-dimensional effect to their pieces.

    Scale or detail does not frighten them. They can condense a city block in a cabinet triptych or a forest in a frame. A human skull, which is thing for morbid fascination for most of us, is only yet one more object d’art for Mondongo to try their transformative skills.

    In their hands, it becomes a canvas to carve African totems, dinosaur - or even Dubai’s Atlantis, which fronts a sea with mediaeval sailing ships in it. The total impact is such that we are sure if Shakespeare’s Hamlet had got his hands on it, he would have burst into another immortal monologue like “Alas, poor Yorick!”

    “We are like three witches stirring it up in a cauldron… attempting to alchemise, to distil and to ooze all the chaos and the all possible ‘all-ness’ in it,” they say in their manifesto, taking their Puckish Shakespearean imagery further. 

    Bold and inventive, Mondongo does not fear to go where others fear even to enter. What is more, their art is so inviting and unique that viewers are mesmerised into following them on their journey. Their social experiments, blessed by an in-your-face sass, does not shy away from exposing the dark undertows of daily subjects. True, some of their offerings have an erotic twist while some precariously walk the tightrope between playfulness and disrespect. But, to their credit, they have an unsullied standing in the art world.

    Mondongo’s work is now not only held in high esteem in Argentina, with their Buenos Aires gallery talking about “Mondongo mania,” but has begun to make an impact internationally, with works collected by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Tate Gallery, UK and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

    Their work is found in public and private collections worldwide and they have exhibited at the Valencia and Sao Paolo biennials, shown in the USA, (Art Basel Miami), Spain, UK, China, Korea and Latin America.

     

     

    CATALOG

    SENSES AND SENSIBILITIES | HEND EL FALAFLY


  • Artists : HEND EL FALAFLY 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 03 June 2012
  • Start Date : 03 June 2012 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 19 June 2012 Time : 10:00 PM

    SENSES AND SENSIBILITIES

    Hend El Falafly, through her most recent and intimate works in “Senses and Sensibilities”, explores the different emotions expressed by women, which are usually part of her personal life. She strongly uses body language to understand the meaningful silence carried over their experiences and their different stories. Hend reflects all its semantics in the facial expressions, movements of the hands and feet, the look, and the clothes, and she reveals then the tension and the emotions repressed. Although the lips are silent, the hands become the voice. The eyes, which transcend all languages, speak in a glance. When the tongue doesn’t speak, the body denies lies and hypocrisies.
     
    “The pencils are my instruments, my tools that I use to express the intimate relationships of my social circle. My work is mixed with strong realism and contains symbolism with very expressive meanings”, Hend says. A different Realism inspires her and has great impact in her works, which breaths from an inherent activity revealed through incredible movement and light. No secret can be kept hidden, all is revealed. 
     

    CATALOG

    COMMENTARIES | MOHAMMAD EL RAWAS


  • Artists : MOHAMMAD EL RAWAS 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 08 May 2012
  • Start Date : 08 May 2012 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 02 June 2012 Time : 10:00 PM

    COMMENTARIES

    Mohammad El Rawas ‘s work is a commentary and record of his emotional and intellectual reactions to circumstances and events, personal or otherwise, happening or prevailing at the time, hence the diversity of the themes tackled in each work and hence the cynical and absurd flavor permeating his work.
    “I do not subject such themes to a value-judgment process; a minor theme is as valid to me as a major one as long as the process of handling and translating either into a work of art is the same. This process is essentially one of association of ideas and juxtaposition of elements” Rawas said.
    El Rawas had participated in more than 40 international art biennales and claimed several prizes. His meticulous three-dimensional structures and mixed media works offer a complex visual and conceptual experience - compelling, enigmatic and vigorously challenging. He “quotes” images from European art, as well as from his Middle Eastern roots, which in their new contexts, remind us of the continuity of human creativity.
    El Rawas invites us to interrogate our experience of the world across time and cultures, through juxtaposed images and icons that shimmer with the contingency of the moment.
    “Juxtaposing words and images, and visual iconography from high art and popular cultural sources, the work of Mohammad El Rawas expresses a fundamental ambivalence demonstrating both a dept to, and an ironic distance from, modernist traditions. El Rawas’ complex multi-media [works] speak to the contemporary experience of fragmentation that is at once universal, and, one suspects, distinctly middle eastern.”
    (Helena Reckitt, ibid)

    El Rawas studied painting at the Institute of Fine Art of the Lebanese University, and graduated in 1975 with honors, receiving the Lebanese University Scholarship to study abroad. The year of his graduation marked the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon, leading the artist to stop painting and to leave his country to Morocco where he stayed for two years in Rabat, teaching art and resuming painting. He returned to Beirut in 1979 to hold his first solo show before joining the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the same year. Upon his return to Beirut in 1981 with a Master’s Degree in printmaking, he started his academic career at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut that lasted for 27 years. Mohammad El Rawas also served for nine years as General-Secretary of the Association of Lebanese Artists, and is a founding member of the Syndicate of Lebanese Artists.
    Since 1979 El Rawas has held eight individual exhibitions in Beirut and London and has participated in more than 40 international art biennials and exhibitions in England, USA, Norway, Tunis, Brazil, Japan, Kuwait, France, the Netherlands, Egypt, the UAE, Poland and China. In these international shows he claimed five prizes and honorable mentions, including, in 2007, the Prize of the Alexandria Biennial of the Art of the Mediterranean Countries, for his first installation and video art piece.
    His work is found in many Museums and public collections in Lebanon, Tunis, Iraq, Jordan, Sharjah, Norway and England.
    Mohammed has exhibited already many times in the region, with a second solo at artsawa, he has been very successful in many international auction sales and also received many prizes and awards.
    artsawa is privileged to welcome him again truly amazing, latest, and second collection of works "Commentaries". 

    CATALOG

    INSTABILITY | AHMED AL BAHRANI


  • Artists : AHMED AL BAHRANI 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 20 April 2012
  • Start Date : 20 April 2012 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 07 May 2012 Time : 10:00 PM

    INSTABILITY

    Ahmed Al Bahrani never understood the meaning or experience of stability. His world is and has been one of constant motion. This can clearly be seen in all his works spanning a 15 year career as a sculptor and artist. This constant movement has helped him be inspired by the world around him and pushed him to challenge himself, to explore and challenge boundaries and to go beyond them and produce exceptional new work, new departure points, always moving forward. For his upcoming show entitled “Instability” Ahmed Al Bahrani has revisited memories, and deepened his nostalgia, where the constant “Instability” coming from the distant past memories and those more recent collide and merge with each other in the unsettled present. The inspiration for his most recent work is rooted in the enchanted animal stories of “Kalilah wa Duminah” a true classic of Arabic literature. Ahmed says “It’s a long path I am working on, and this recent body of work is driven by my inner thinking, it is an experiment in my quest, my search for stability.”

     

    CATALOG

    FIGURE OUT | CONTEMPORARY TURKISH ART


  • Start Date : 20 March 2012 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 19 April 2012 Time : 11:00 PM

    FIGURE  OUT - CONTEMPORARY TURKISH ART 

    Artists: ASLI TORCU |ELIF VAROL ERGEN |ESREF YILDIRIM |FUNDA ALKAN |GÜLIN HAYAT TOPDEMIR |LEVENT MORGÖK |ONUR GÜLFIDAN |ÖZLEM SIMSEK |VOLKAN ASLAN |ÇINAR ESLEK |FIRAT NEZIROGLU |GÖKÇE ER |NAZLI EDA NOYAN |ÖZGÜR KORKMAZGIL |ZEYNEP KAYAN |BURÇAK BINGÖL |NEJAT SATI |AYSEGÜL SAGBAS |ZEREN GÖKTAN 

    Figuring out starts from the self. Questions and answers that arise within life constitute the complicated equation of existence for each of us individually. The only way to come to terms with this peculiar equation is an ultimate confrontation with the self as well as with the surroundings. The bi-directional flow of this confrontational state, which starts from the center of the self, spreading to the environment and immediately returning back to itself, forms the backbone of arts, an elegant means of understanding the world and of defining new meanings.
     
    In a time, when decade-old governments are being overthrown; assumingly resistant economies are shaken to the foundation; and unexpected voices are occupying the streets, we are all simultaneously experiencing a historical shift on a global scale. Artistic tools and methods serve for achieving the purpose, and there is no doubt that they will emerge as the remarkable results of this cataclysmic confrontation. 
     
    Turkey, as a young republic, amidst breathtaking unrest in her east and west, is literally a bridge between Asia and Europe with a heavy inheritance from the Ottoman Empire. While the dynamic social structure impregnated by many different cultures harbored in addition to the Mediterranean spirit creates a hybrid, high-blood-pressured mixture with a skill of being highly adaptive, this social texture, in turn, provides a prolific inspirational space with abundance for the artists.
    It would not be wrong to state that the fine arts production has started in Turkey in the 19th century by following the West. The Renaissance, places the human being in the center of every possible discipline of study; arts takes the figure as its focal subject and it examines by fragmenting it into its different aspects from appearance to the spiritual and psychological projections through various styles. Unlike the west, Ottoman couldn't adopt this approach then due to the dominant Islamic culture, which did not allow depicting humans in artwork fearing that idolatry would be resurrected. It is due to this that it was as late as 1906 when art classes with live models started to take place. 
     
    Throughout the 20th century, Turkish art not only followed the west but also found its way to figure out all challenging issues finding its own voice. Despite the obstacles like a military coup as well as tumultuous political and economic instabilities; arts somehow found its path to stream and convey itself to the future. Globalization as well as technological progress was in full effect on culture therefore arts have become even more intense on discovering its own character in the 90’s. Beyond being an artistically fine production, it started to question various issues from identity to history; and from westernization to migration to establish a base for some existential issues through various media and artistic methods.
    Rather than a whole made up of mixed approaches and mediums, this exhibition at artsawa takes figure as its baseline. The figures and narratives from their own world are not just subsequent self-reflections to come to terms with life, they also portrait conditions of being alive in a certain time and place. It is constituted of the art works of 19 artists, many of whom are from Istanbul, which is the center of a very cosmopolitan structure. 
     
    The selected works of Funda Alkan, Volkan Arslan, Burçak Bingöl, Gökçe Er, Çinar Eslek, Elif Varol Ergen, Zeren Göktan, Onur Gülfidan, Zeynep Kayan, Özgür Korkmazgil, Levent Morgök, Firat Neziroglu, Nazli Eda Noyan, Aysegül Sagbas, Nejat Sati, Özlem Simsek, Gülin Hayat Topdemir, Asli Torcu, Mehmet Ali Uysal, Esref Yildirim confront the world they perceive through figures. 
     
    Onur Gülfidan, Volkan Aslan, Nazli Eda Noyan with the works they have structured referencing recent history and powered by the agenda of the government; Mehmet Ali Uysal, Firat Neziroglu, Levent Morgök, Özgür Korkmazgil with their realistic figurative starting points, they interpret and dissociate the content into different layers with the diverse materials they utilize; Zeynep Kayan and Burçak Bingöl, with alternative definitions of "the self" they offer, using photographic works based on self-image, Gülin Hayat Topdemir, Aysegül Sagbas, Elif Varol Ergen, Gökçe Er, Nejat Sati, Asli Torcu with their fantastic, magical, and mysterious atmospheres; Özlem Simsek, Esref Yildirim, Funda Alkan; with the historical figure interpretations through various mediums such as video, paintings and sewing; Çinar Eslek probing the concept of time coming with life by getting to the core of creation itself; Zeren Göktan bringing together the parts of a series of photographic moments meticulously collected to solve the mystery of life; are all contributors to this unique exhibition with their selected works.
     
    Burçak Bingöl 
    Istanbul-2012

    CATALOG

    HIDING | MARWA ADEL


  • Artists : MARWA ADEL 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 28 February 2012
  • Start Date : 28 February 2012 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 18 March 2012 Time : 10.00 PM

    HIDING 

    Marwa Adel’s photographs speak about the struggles she has faced in her life. They express her desire to break free from the restrictions imposed on women by society and to be the person that she is rather than what society forces her to be. Her work is deeply personal, but it tells a universal story.
     
    The Egyptian artist has a Master’s degree in advertising and is a lecturer at the Faculty of Applied Art at Helwan University, Cairo. Since the beginning of her career, Marwa has defied traditional norms by using pictures of the human body in her work. And she has won many awards for her bold and powerful creations. Marwa’s artworks combine carefully posed photographs of models with symbols of fragility such as leaves, flowers and torn paper. Her wedding dress and veil also appear in the pictures as a reminder of bitter sweet memories. She also adds digital textures, light effects and pieces of her calligraphic paintings to create beautiful and eloquent compositions.
     
    In “Hiding”, her latest series of photographic works, the artist explores the infinite conflict and the state of contradiction and antagonism that is part of our existence. Once again, she uses the bare human body as a metaphor for the thoughts and feelings hidden inside it. The anonymous women in Marwa’s photographs appear fragile and lonely. Their eyes are covered, yet you can feel the sea of emotions surging within. Their bodies are exposed, yet they conceal their thoughts, desires and feelings. These women represent no one and everyone. But their tense bodies speak about how painful it is to hide the truth.
     
    The black and white colors of the pictures highlight the conflict between the real self of these women and the person they pretend to be. The recurring appearance of her wedding dress symbolizes her marriage which was the turning point in her life, and the impulse to rethink deeply her intimate self, her feelings and objectives of her life.
     
    “Hiding is a universal human phenomenon. We try to hide from fear, pain, darkness or cruelty. And we also hide our feelings, our memories, our happiness and all the precious moments that we are afraid of losing. Sometimes we hide behind masks or walls because we are afraid to confront others or to say or do what we want. But the truth in our soul cannot be hidden”, says Marwa.

    CATALOG

    WITNESS | WAEL DARWESH


  • Artists : WAEL DARWESH 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 26 January 2012
  • Start Date : 26 January 2012 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 23 February 2012 Time : 10:00 PM

    WITNESS 

    A year ago…
     
    Wael Darwesh reached the boiling point.
     
    Although he tried to remain calm, questions kept on creeping in his head; questions without answers crammed themselves before his eyes.
     
    Often to keep hope alive, only self-deceit was the option, the only way was to stay alive. Ultimately, avoiding reality seemed to be the only choice to avoid perishing in anger.
     
    “Are we still alive?” Wael asked. He believed no one is capable of answering such question anymore. Everyone around him was silently dying for change. There were dark clouds of change hovering all over.
     
    “Art is my profession and this establishes a strong connection with the political situation, with political dialogue and its discourse… My Art provides a visual drama often including glimpses of the real world through photographs, as eye-witnesses to actual events… Describing my art as political appeared long before the 25th of January 2011. Though my work was cautious to curb wild feelings, even marginalizing that condition and then it actually happened”, said Wael.
     
    Quite often, he was haunted by the question: How would a bystander express his or her thoughts?
     
    As they do not have a means to steam off thoughts, Wael has made himself a non-stop transmitter and receiver, when his only signal or message was his paintings portraying arguments gripping the Egyptian street, depicting visual and rare dramas.
     
    Nobody could have predicted how the future would evolve when no readymade scenario ready to apply. It is simply a dream that all of sudden came true, and the thirst for freedom inside eventually came out prior to the Revelation/Revolution of the 25th of January.
     
    In June 2010, Wael exhibited at artsawa works under the title “Shrouded Memories”, which is another name that he had thought was a “Witness”. 
    Wael never revealed that for fear of being held accountable.
     
    Today, the answers are crystal clear after the 25th of January 2011. It becomes the real barometer of Revolution and he simply depicts what he witnessed.
    History will seek to understand the ensuing events and he felt that many things have changed.
    “Witness” is an enjoyable expression of freedom.

    CATALOG

    STILL NATURE | ZENA ASSI


  • Artists : ZENA ASSI 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 07 December 2011
  • Start Date : 07 December 2011 Time : 06:00 PM
  • End Date : 20 January 2012 Time : 10.00 PM

    STILL NATURE

    Originating in the middle ages and ancient Greek Roman art, a still life or a ‘nature morte’ is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter…
    In this latest body of works, the literal dualism between the so called ‘still life’ and the ‘nature morte’ is reinterpreted in order to raise few questions:
    First, when does a life stop being still and becomes ‘morte’ as dead?
    Secondly, where is the thin red line between the two?
    The genre is expanded beyond the boundaries of a frame.
    The still life becomes a vehicle for explorations in order to reveal both the physical structure and the emotional subtext of our contemporary society.
    Both bouquets and sitting sculptures are rendered as stagnating life forms containing a social allegorical symbolism relating to an actual Lebanese situation. When the society is resigned to sit and wait, when they let go of their freedom of choice and their will to act, don’t they take the highest form of life and relegate it to the very lowest order of life form? A lifeless life form?

    DRESS CODE PROJECT


  • Artists : Collective Exhibition 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 19 October 2011
  • Start Date : 19 October 2011 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 05 December 2011 Time : 11:00 PM

    DRESS CODE PROJECT
     
    Artists: NERMINE HAMMAM |RACHIDA AZDAOU |SAMTA BENYAHIA |SUMAYYAH SUWAIDI |GHASSAN ALI GHAIB |FATMA BUCAK |MARYA KAZOUN |FADI YAZIGI| MAHMOUD AL OBAIDI |ZENA ASSI AND ISSAM BARHOUCH |NAIZA KHAN |AHMED AL BAHRAN
     
    In 1996, the art critic Germano Celant committed the resources of the city of Florence in a large Biennial, whose title was Time and Fashion, which aim was not only to compare but, for the first time, to involve art and fashion in the same projectuality, treating the two dimensions in exactly the same way as creative entities capable and responsible to constantly articulate a thinking and an innovative synthesis about the world and contemporary reality. The choice, quite amazing at that time, violated a deeply rooted and consistent taboo of the idealist thought, “confirmed” by the famous and oft-cited joke of one of the best fashion designers ever, Coco Chanel: “Fashion is what you like immediately, but not tomorrow, art is what you do not like right away but you’ll like tomorrow. “In other words, quoting the same Chanel, “fashion passes, style remains”. Fashion and art had always been treated, so to say, as opposite entities: ephemeral, commercial and consumerist the first one, essential, universal and tend-to-be “eternal” the second one. In short, “true” values against “fake” ones.
     
    Celant however, in full coherence with the brilliant situation that the “Made in Italy” was going through at that moment, spoke in favor of a different dimension, both for fashion and art: by making the first down from its traditional pedestal and immersing it in a virtual space for communication and exchange of forms and values far more lively and incisive than the old fashioned museum, and offering to the second unexpected and unusual opportunities of celebration and appreciation. In essence, “contaminating” museums with works by fashion designers, from Moschino to Calvin Klein, by inviting artists to produce art works-dresses (as did, for example, Rosemarie Trockel and Jan Fabre, who presented his disturbing clothes made of beetles) and, finally, engaging artists and designers to work together in pavilions designed by four hands.
     
    This event, which has remained a one-off, made history: from that moment it was established a kind of osmosis between fashion and art, plans and prospects for joint discussion and joint actions, which could have affected the very nature of the “person” at a time when distinguish between “natural and artificial, between mind and body, between physical and a-physical” was and has become very difficult if not impossible. Today, with Dress-Code, the challenge that, in his time, was taken up by Celant, is taken again and adapted to very different time and situation: This project, conceived by Amel Makkawi as an open invitation, to artists and professionals active in the Arab world and vicinity, to create an artwork in form of dress, raises once again the strategic alliance between art and fashion culture, setting it in an area of the world especially critical and sensitive to the communicative poignancy of these two signifiers together.
     
    Dress, in fact, in the Arab world or, more generally, in the Islamic world, rather than fashion, choice, freedom of expression, contamination of languages, is a word that shows ties with the tradition, with the concealment, the repression of the body - especially the female body. But “dress” in the East, far more than in the West, is a word that contains also sophisticated and complex symbolic connotations and religious affiliation, reported by styles, shapes, colors and fabrics.
     
    The East, in fact, is precisely the realm of tissue, the place - the combination of places and spaces and traditions - where tissue culture has been more and more deeply varied: among “ikat” and “suzani”, among embroidery, damask work, brocade and lace works, among precious silks and satins and cottons, and endless variations of working, textures, colors, braids and knots.
     
    The East, in short, is the realm of textile and consequently of dresses: it is also with this huge legacy that the artists who have joined this project had to confront; the realization of which has needed about a year of very careful work and accurate selection of proposals.
     
    But we must not imagine that “art work in form of dress” has resulted in the production of wearable objects that reflect the pattern of “Dress Code”. This pattern, for the participants, was simply a memory, an empty container, an elastic theme. Their works, indeed, cover all the techniques and forms of expression: from collage to multimedia, from video to photography to installation ... to “dresses”, but not conceived to be wearable.
     
    Expression: from collage to multimedia, from video to photography to installation ... to “dresses”, but not conceived to be wearable. The protagonists of “Dress Code” are twelve: all together they cover a vast area of cultures and countries, extended from Algeria to Pakistan and from Turkey to Egypt to the Emirates, via Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. This is already in itself a meaningful result, and a sign that the project has aroused interest and that a variety of extraordinary pieces have been produced, which reflect, of course, first of all the individual creativity (they are indeed “art-works” in the full sense), but also the experience of each person, the difficulty of the daily existence, the experience of conflict, violence, but also the inspiration of beauty and, last but not least, the sexism, male-female relationship, an especially delicate topic which does not surprise to find regarded and treated with particular focus and dedication from the artists, especially the women-artists.
     
    Women -artists: as it often happens, it hits here too the happy exuberance and creativity of women artists of the Arab world, who are capable of comprehensive responses and incisive, relevant, timely, and lucid interventions. Their works focuses on sensuality and sexuality, but it also proves to be a powerful tool for introspection, for narrative and even for a declared, stinging irony.
     
    This is the case of Naiza Khan, who presented two objects, a corset and a belt full of not too hidden references to the object which was known as “chastity belt”. Objects “between love and war,” as she puts it: objects made of hard metal and strong, masculine fiber leather, equipped with aggressive protrusions and attractive zippers, but in any case “dresses” that evoke an armored, defended, seemingly inaccessible body, but also a body who is provocative, ambiguous and terribly sexy.
     
    Marya Kazoun has enriched her Baroque and fleshy dress of a number of existential elements that accompany, not without anguish, a woman’s life: sex, childbirth, the sprawling and almost suffocating wrapping that can characterize the relationship between mother and daughter; and finally, death and decomposition. Her dress is impregnated with moods and reminiscent of some anti-form experience, for example by Eva Hesse.
     
    Fatma Bucak has used for her dress a heavy synthetic rubber characterized by a shiny surface that reflects the world and protects the body, placed inside as if in a kind of cocoon. The shape of this dress is typical of the one worn by the archaic Greek “Kore” (maids), covered, yes, but always provided of an individual and unique face. On the contrary, this synthetic and heavy dress denies the face – also the placement “backwards” of the dress avoids the define, any connotations and even the sexual references. The dress makes us whatever, that is all, that is nobody.
     
    Nermine Hammam has used the strong emotions of the Egyptian revolution of last January, to produce a work in which references cross and multiply each other: on one hand the Iranian miniatures, a quintessential traditional artistic practice, on the other the ideal warrior, a revolutionary centaur. Camouflage overalls, tiny feet rooted to the ground, Frida Kahlo’s memories, traditional Arab patterns, in other words, an efflorescence of contradictions and at the center of it all, inevitably, a self-portrait (because it is only by ourselves, from our limited and partial point of view that we get experiences and emotions).
     
    Rachida Azdaou has woven a dress, simple in appearance, with strips of white tape, synthetic and almost transparent, marked by irregular patterns of metal wire. A dress which is thin, fragile, delicate but artificial. A sensitive suit that, supposedly, heals deep wounds. A dress unpretentious, designed as therapy for a world too hard and pressing.
     
    Samta Benyahia is presenting on this occasion two dresses made of plastic material, very “feminine” and inlaid with all the precious appearance of traditions of the desert. Her work, in general, is based on the relationship between transparency and decoration, between inlay and light. The dress, transparent, has been made   solid and plastic thanks to ancient decorative shapes used all over the Arab world. Blue color on emptiness, gold on blue: the decorative forms evoke ancient traditions, rituals and timeless symbols. The dress becomes a kind of virtuosity, an exercise of lights and shadows, solid and void, inlay and transparency: totally traditional and totally original.
     
    Sumayyah Suwaidi uses the pattern chosen for Dress Code as an ideal screen for projecting a problematic relationship, yet smiling, between a double idea of the   self: an intimate inner-self and a decorated, even plumed with peacock feathers outer-self. Because, the dress is also this: a diaphragm, the threshold of dialectic of existence.
     
    Zena Assi and Issam Barhouch have worked together: their intervention consists of two dresses, very different from each other, the first dedicated to the city of Beirut (My city my puppet) and the second to an original raw material made by the shining, “golden” face of hundreds of bullet - a stunning reinterpretation of the “metal” clothes designed in the eighties by Italian designer Gianni Versace. Beirut: an extraordinarily fascinating and contradictory city, as the situation of Lebanese women. Free, in fact, according to law but not in fact, free apparently but not substantially. The “City” dress is a patchwork of contradictory and spurious images, of partial images and graffiti, which seem to contradict each other, attached to the shoulders of the hypothetical model not as expected, with strips of cloth, but with chains. On the other hand, the second cloth, Bullet Points, is an elegant evening dress, for a dress all in gold. The sophisticated style and brilliant appearance speak in favor of an evening gala, a circumstance of great impact and splendor. The raw material, however, are large caliber bullets, dangerous, even deadly offensive elements, woven together by an elegant copper wire. “The Arab woman is in fact treated as an object” confirm the two authors. Their idea was to “create a dress made of shiny golden dots, conveying a glittery luxurious vision of an icon from afar that takes a completely opposite dimension when one gets a closer look and realizes that the golden dots are in fact the heads of bullets”.
    Male-artists too have expressed strong narratives through works of great expressive power, and often poignant relevance. Beginning with Ahmed Al Bahrani, whose suit of steel, riddled by hits of anonymous bullet, without reasons or mandators, contains a clear reference to the tragic situation of Christian minorities in Iraq: to the essential equality of all men, the artist comments, it is superimposed a dress, a surface immediately mystified as “identity.” And it is the dress that one shoots, it is the dress that one tries to kill but it is the person who dies under the dress.
     
    Fadi Yazigi emphasizes the protective function of the cloth, which protects a fragile body from insults and attacks of reality and society. His work, though softened by the beautiful painted panels that descend like a sumptuous cloak along the foot of the bust and of the large skirt, is more reminiscent of a cage that a dress: even from the collar comes out a kind of suffocating hood. An unlivable dress.
     
    Mahmoud Al Obaidi puts his person at the center of a review of the precariousness of any identity connotation conveyed by clothing. In his video, constituted through a sequence of images of himself, half-length, images very similar to those used by police to file or detainees suspected of any crime, he wears a set of clothes / costumes that tackle his identity. To be someone else, just strip and change dress.

    Ghassan Ali Ghaib made two dresses, significantly titled Home Industry. In both cases, they are made of recycled, recovered material, reintegrated with difficulty in the movement of commodities and of meanings of the world. In the first case, where “production” is completed, we are dealing with a suit of chain, supported by straps of old wood that evokes the unfortunate palm trees of the Iraqi desert. In the second case, the production is still in progress: from an old sewing machine is emerging the dress on which it is printed a map of Iraq, all furrowed with tears and zippers. It is not certain yet whether the stitching will proceed to the end and pleats along the edges of this devastated country, or if the parties shall stand and the skirt will be split permanently from the bodice. The work is still in progress.
     
    Almost a conclusion: it is more clear than ever that today’s social arrangements, both those from  the Eastern as those from the Western world, are breaking up under the influence of ethnic, religious, industrial, cultural and economic factors. Day by day, we increasingly seem to find ourselves at the terminus of a great dream - the end of a developmental model. In this twilight, or perhaps dawn, still plays a dramatic role the great conflict between humanism and technology: a lot of humanity is left behind, on the road, losing, over and over again, its values. It is urgent, more urgent than ever, that culture and art participate in redesigning the clothes for the new humanity. The one that, in this morning not free from anxiety is awakening.
     
    By Martina Corgnati

    CATALOG

    SELF STORIES: BIRDS & I | AHMED ASKALANY


  • Artists : AHMED ASKALANY 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | DIFC
  • Preview : 21 September 2011
  • Start Date : 21 September 2011 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 16 October 2011 Time : 11:00 PM

    SELF STORIES: BIRDS & I

    Critics and art connoisseurs alike have already described Ahmed Askalany as one of the most unique and inimitable sculptors of his generation.

    Making already his Dubai debut at artsawa, Askalany will be exhibiting his latest collection of emotive sculptures entitled “Self Stories: Birds & I.”
    Askalany’s subjects are simple human figures and animals inspired by and representative of his native town, Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt.
    His work mostly retained an explicit connection with traditional materials and craft methods associated with the ancient cultures of Egypt. Traditional aesthetic forms that place an emphasis on both structure and volume characterize Askalany’s works, but the volumes are distorted with a minimal head on a giant body. Askalany’s works possess a sense of innocence alongside a state of isolation reflecting both frankness and candor. Nonetheless, the works retain a profound nature and sense of innocence. There is no specific formula that Askalany uses when creating his works of art, the final work often represents this by becoming humorous or naïve but always with a poetic sensitivity. This connection allows his work to become unique and unmistakable, yet at the same time does not stop him being thoroughly up to date.
     
    Speaking about his next exhibition, Askalany commented, “My philosophy is simplicity, to convey the idea directly to the viewer without overcomplicating the message with too much detail… I’m extremely excited to be able to show again my latest works to the UAE.”
    Askalany’s short career has thus far been blessed with success and his latest body of work is sure to be a favorite amongst the region’s art enthusiasts.
     

    CATALOG

    THANKS FOR THE SUNSHINE | JALAL LUQMAN


  • Artists : JALAL LUQMAN 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 26 April 2011
  • Start Date : 26 April 2011 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 26 June 2011 Time : 10:00 PM

    THANKS FOR THE SUNSHINE 

    “Thanks for the Sunshine” is a departure from Jalal Luqman’s often aggressive and dark world of cerebral journeys. Once again Luqman sheds another skin to reveal yet another later of his often dark and mysterious personality. “A man wakes up to see his love sitting up in front of him with the sun shining behind her as if the sun light is emanating from her,” he utters. Thanks for the Sunshine, says Luqman is the body work where he reveals his intimate persona in its darkest and its brightest times, as well as expressions of love and hate, through different mediums (acrylic on canvas, digital oils on Metallic paper, and monumental work). It reveals his intimate struggles to paint after showing his anger where now love is allowed to be expressed.
     
    In a constant search for truth, the body of work in “Thanks for the Sunshine” is an invite to explore much more.

    CATALOG

    PRISMATIC CITY | KARINE ROCHE


  • Artists : KARINE ROCHE 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 23 March 2011
  • Start Date : 23 March 2011 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 24 April 2011 Time : 11:00 PM

    PRISMATIC CITY

    Under the Patronage of His Excellency  Mr. Alain Azouaou, Ambassador of France to the UAE 

    artsawa proudly presents the first solo exhibition in the UAE of the talented Karine Roche.

    Roche’s works are sensitive surfaces, a mix of classicism and modernity, precision and spontaneity, excitement and stillness.

    She loves nature and loves city, vegetation and architecture, urban flora and fauna. She uses the subject as vocabulary – a pretext to carry out her work, the real subject is painting, the city, its pollution and overcrowding, the need of still more, still the largest, bulimia of frivolity disperse the earth and sky… in the activities, travels, and noises.

    We often forget that it is also a part of the environment and nature in which men evolve. The city in this case Dubai, fascinates for its ability to absorb and transform nature and men. First there are the travels and observations, and then the witness photos of places, from which will be organized each painting. Several photos are the backbone of the canvas and keep the traces of the old reality.

    The networks of cities and plant networks, perspective, space, foregrounds and backgrounds, depth, lines, colors, materials, all organic and architectural forms clump together, overlap and become a poetic whole.

    She sets new rules for growth and expansion of roots, branches, flowers, buildings and districts. She gives rise to an aesthetic struggle where each element of the painting retains or occupies space, territory, and goes from nonexistent to extremely dense. Layer upon layer, Karine Roche breaks images until explosion, splits them, stretches them, and multiplies them to create exuberant fractal urban jungles.

    The materials are part of the work. Her paintings are made of blends of fabrics and canvas mounted on wood frames more or less square.

    Speaking about her work, Karine says “I do not wish to give any answer on the end of an era, neither on a rebellion of nature or an urban ecology. All I want is to introduce a formal and informal questioning on the chromatic and graphic dynamic”.

    CATALOG

    COASTAL PROMENADE | CAMILLE ZAKHARIA


  • Artists : CAMILLE ZAKHARIA 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 22 February 2011
  • Start Date : 22 February 2011 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 22 March 2011 Time : 11:00 PM

    COASTAL PROMENADE

    “Coastal Promenade” is Camille Zakharia’s latest photographic essay and part of the Reclaim project which won Bahrain the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2010. Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, and curated by Noura Al-Sayeh, the “Coastal Promenade” portfolio illustrates the diversity of the coastal landscape along the shores of the Kingdom of Bahrain. The images range from the more somber themes of the ecological effects of land reclamation to a lighter look at the way in which their users are appropriating these coastal areas.

    Candid in his approach, Camille Zakharia attempts to paint the true color of the place and its people during a time of dramatic change.

    Camille Zakharia was born in 1962 in Tripoli, Lebanon and currently lives and works in Manama, Bahrain. Zakharia uses his camera as a tool for the documentation of the journey that he has embarked on since his departure from Lebanon in 1985 in the wake of the civil war. 

    In his work, Zakharia explores segments of his daily life activities while reflecting on the broader issues related to the notions of home, identity and belonging in the context of the globalized condition. The outcome is thousands of individual images constituting blocks that construct larger subjects; people and places, transformed urban settings, architecture and interiors. In this sense, his work goes beyond mere autobiographical documentation to reflect upon the human condition in today’s world.

    On October 20, 2010, in his first public presentation in Dubai, organized by the British Council and artsawa, Camille Zakharia walked the audience through a captivating visual journey, discussing major projects completed in the last 15 years reflecting on issues related to the sense of self and belonging. 

    Camille Zakharia has exhibited prolifically at prestigious venues in North America, Europe and the Middle East.

    artsawa will be proudly showing “Coastal Promenade” and has a wide variety of Camille Zakharia’s works, ranging from his landmark photo collages and artist books, to photomontages and straight photography.

     

    CATALOG

    MIXED UP VIEWS | ALI RAZA


  • Artists : ALI RAZA 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 27 January 2011
  • Start Date : 27 January 2011 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 15 February 2011 Time : 11:00 PM

    MIXED UP VIEWS 

    The work of Ali Raza evolves with the interaction of diverse ideas taken from a variety of visual sources. It is a synthesis of varied subject matters driven by historical events, Indian miniature painting, social issues that shape modern day Pakistan and popular and mass culture. Yet, these extremely thought provoking pieces express a specific element of satire and humour.
     
    Ali Raza combines images of both popular and elitist culture in art, with emphasis on the banal or kitschy elements inspired from ancient, South Asian and international post-capitalist cultures. At times, his art places emphasis on the academic roots as seen in his acrylic canvases, at others, he resorts to techniques that downplay the expressive hand of the artist as in Door and Blackboard. The latter, convey a sense of fragility and are bound by time.
     
    Ali Raza seeks to liberate himself from the narrow confines of a particular art form refusing to be bound by a given stylistic approach.
     
    The artist today negotiates sharpening contradictions as he/she moves between locations. The rapidity and frequency with which these dislocations occur, introduces a new circumstance into the artist’s existence. The absence or proliferation of context creates the possibility of multilayering from memories to rootedness, still others from the swiftness of transition. Ali Raza’s works are open to both imperatives.

    CATALOG

    MEMORY | MARWA ADEL


  • Artists : MARWA ADEL 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 16 November 2010
  • Start Date : 16 November 2010 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 16 January 2011 Time : 11:00 PM

    MEMORY

    The human body is a word surrounded by restrictions in our Middle Eastern societies. Why do people express such a fear from the body? How could we fear ourselves? Our bodies are the medium that links us to this world and reflects our souls. Every person takes pleasure in a memory that registers facts different from other people. These memories and dreams are revealed on our bodies through body language, expressions of serenity, sadness, happiness and other emotions towards occurring events or recalled facts. Through our body, we can modify our memories that are often stereotyped according to others experiences. We can also develop our memory and dreams through our human experience which represents a mean for excellence, authenticity and distinctiveness to arise. Consequently, every person develops a personal memory enriched by the unique human existence that mirrors on the body through which one can realize dreams. There is nothing impossible to achieve as long as the communication and interaction between the body and the memory are existent. In this solo exhibition, Marwa is focusing on in this human situation that the human body aims to be liberated from and the interaction between the body and the memory and what memories, dreams and aspirations it holds.

    CATALOG

    SHROUDED MEMORIES | WAEL DARWESH


  • Artists : WAEL DARWESH 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 26 June 2010
  • Start Date : 26 June 2010 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 24 August 2010 Time : 10:00 PM

    SHROUDED MEMORIES 

    “In the past few years I have been much concerned with the changing perceptions and the state of continuous social metamorphosis that Egypt has witnessed in the last three decades. In my mixed media projects, I try to probe several phenomena that constitute for me some permanent obsessions, like time, its relevance to the subject matter employed, elements of migration, gender, identity, among other themes that attract several Egyptian artists of my generation.
    Technically, I apply assemblages to create installation/ sculptural states that transcend simple two-dimensional art forms; through the studied and experimental use of collage I combine colour, calligraphy, textile, and various textural media to explore issues of space and passage of time.” explained Darwesh. 
     
    Khaled Hafez comments on this exhibition:”Wael Darwesh’s painting projects in the past few years were inspired by American Colour Field painting and French Lyrical Abstraction, where large “fields” of flat solid colour colonize harmoniously large areas of the canvas to create a homogenous surface of flat picture plane, stressing on the overall consistency of form over the brush movement and brushstrokes. Contrary to standard Colour Field and Lyrical Abstraction Darwesh for years have successfully combined abstraction styles and painterly techniques with elements of figuration and cognitive representation. 
     
    In his 2010 works, Wael Darwesh uses his cumulative experience as a painter as well as an interdisciplinary artist to create canvases that uses photography as a base for his brush, eliminating along the way backgrounds. In this process, the artist creates, and narrates, an alternative reality for the figures that filled the planes of the initial photograph. The streets of Cairo act as a location much representative of contemporary Middle Eastern urban cities; ordinary citizens dwell the streets and alleys alongside soldiers and traffic policemen. Every photographed or painted individual play a different role while interacting with each other in a universe that is almost hyper real. Darwesh attempts to extend the limits of standard painting, and expands the battery of symbols proposed by this medium by accumulating what photography can add to the canvas: frozen reality, depth of field, and more visual symbols that Jean Baudrillard proposed –in his seminal work on simulation and simulacra-- as defining our contemporary over-industrialized societies today”.

    CATALOG

    MASS MOVEMENT | ZENA ASSI


  • Artists : ZENA ASSI 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 25 May 2010
  • Start Date : 25 May 2010 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 25 June 2010 Time : 11:00 PM

    MASS MOVEMENT

    The core of Freud’s “crowd behaviour” theory is that people who are in a crowd act differently from those who are thinking individually. The minds of the group would merge to form a way of thinking and one becomes less aware of the true nature of one’s actions.
    This exhibition is an attempt to portray the psychology of the crowd, whether it is called heritage, civilization, social organization, universality, globalization, urbanism, fashion, or mainstream.
    The habitat and the society are both subjects to an accumulation factor, forming together a certain mass that has its own thought and behaviour, requirements and regulations.
     
    The direction, distance, sequence, pace, order and rhythm can be visually translated… In these spaces there is compression and a taut of energy, a behaviour pattern that overcomes thee single-valued, the expected and prevalent that prevails over the exceptional and genuine.
    It is a collective effort and energy to be simply and passively common.

    CATALOG

    RECENT WORKS |2008 – 2010 | MOHAMMAD EL RAWAS


  • Artists : MOHAMMAD EL RAWAS 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 06 May 2010
  • Start Date : 06 May 2010 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 06 June 2010 Time : 10:00 PM

    RECENT WORKS | 2008 - 2010 

    Mohammad El Rawas is well known for his complex mixed media and assemblages. In his work, “Each surface is carefully mapped out, divided into sections and ‘framed’ which suggests containment whether in form of dominant cultural hierarchies or proscribed spaces. The juxtaposition of different materials, their associated meanings, and the images work to subvert these constrictions in various ways and introduce contradiction.” -  Fran Lloyd, 2003
     
    “Juxtaposing words and images, and visual iconography from high art and popular cultural sources, the work of Mohammad El Rawas expresses a fundamental ambivalence demonstrating both a depth to, and an iconic distance from, modernist traditions. El Rawas’ complex multi-media works speak to the contemporary experience of fragmentation that is at once understood, and one suspects, distinctly Middle Eastern” - Helena Reckitt

    CATALOG

    CREATIVE PALESTINIAN ART | COMPETITION, EXHIBITION & PUBLICATION


  • Start Date : 15 March 2010 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 04 May 2010 Time : 10:00 PM

    CREATIVE PALESTINIAN ART

    Under the patronage of H.E. Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, in partnership with the Welfare Association, Art Sawa is holding a juried fine Arts competition and exhibition, entitled CREATIVE PALESTINIAN ART as a one-of-a-kind nonprofit cultural initiative.
     
    Professional Artists: MOHAMAD FADEL |RAEDA SAADEH |SAMA ALSHAIBI| ABD AL RAUF AL AJOURI |AHMAD IABUALLKASS |AHMED ABU NASSER |AISSA DEEBI| ASHRAF SAHWIEL |BASHAR ALHROUB |BASHIR JERIES YOUSEF QONQAR| BASSEL ABD ALKAREEM ALAKLOUK |DINA MOHAMMED MATTAR |IBRAHIM YOUSIF JAWABREH |IHAB ANTONIO SACCA |INASS YASSIN |INGY EL TELAWI KANJ |IYAD SABBAH |JAD SALMAN |JAWAD AL MALHI |KHALED HOURANI |LAILA SHAWA |MAZEN ABDULLAH SA’ADEH |MOHAMED ABUSAL |MOHAMED HARB| MOHAMED IBRAHIM HASSAN ALDABOUS |MOHAMED KHALIL |MOHAMMAD AL JALOOS| MOHAMMED ABU NASSER| MOHAMMED AL-HAWAJRI| MOHAMMED JOHA| NABIL ANANI |NATASHA MA’ANI |NIDAL MOHAMMED ABO OUN |NOEL JABBOUR |OMAR JALAL ANABOUSI |OSAMA SAID |RAED ISSA|  AFAT MAZOOZ IZAT AZAD |RUFAIDA MOHAMMED SEHWAEL |RULA HALAWANI |SALMAN MOUZAFAR AL-NAWATI |SAMIA TAKTAK ZARU |SHADI AL ZAQZOUQ| SHADI HABIB ALLA AND TAYSEER BARAKAT
     
    Amateur Artists: ISRA’ ODEH| YAZID ANANI| MUNIR ALAWI| AYMAN TA’AMAR| EVONE ALAWI| LARA ABU SHARKH| MAXIM ZAQTAN| NIDA HAJ-ALI-QATAMESH| NOUR SAIED-AHMAD| REHAM ODEH| AND SAMAR AL-HUSSEINI
     
    CREATIVE PALESTINIAN ART’s mission is two-fold. First to give Palestinian artists throughout the world, a regional venue to compete, show their work and to be part of a highly mediatized event that will give them maximum exposure; second to work in partnership with the WELFARE ASSOCIATION and contribute to its mission to improve the lives of Palestinians. This initiative does this in two ways, offering Palestinian creativity a forum, and raising funding for the WELFARE ASSOCIATION, which in turn will be used by the association for the promotion of culture and art in the occupied territories.
     
    CREATIVE PALESTINIAN ART brings together 45 professional artists and 11 amateur artists in a juried competition with Awards and Prizes and will feature a month-long exhibition showcasing the finest contemporary artists from Palestine and its Diaspora.
     
    The UAE-based jury is comprised of leading figures in the Arts, and Art Sawa is grateful to the following individuals for their participation in the jury: Mr Zaki Nusseibeh - Advisor Presidential Court and Vice Chairman Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage; Mr William Laurie - Head of Sale at Christie’s Dubai and Head of Modern and Contemporary Arab & Iranian Art worldwide; Mr Ali Khadra Founder and Publisher of Canvas Magazine; Mr Omar Donia - Co-founder of Contemporary Practices Magazine, a specialized semi-academic art Journal concerned with contemporary art in the Middle East; Massimiliano Lodi - Manager for Abu Dhabi Tourism and Development Investment Company (TDIC) - Cultural Department; and Amel B.Makkawi - Founder and Director, Art Sawa 
     
    CREATIVE PALESTINIAN ART is not only an exciting opportunity for Palestinian artists and the Diaspora to present their work to a new audience, but also represents a platform for their voices to find expression through their art. 
     
    The works in exhibition are varied, thought provoking, touching and raw. They form an effort to clarify the artist’s vision, especially at this time where harassment and suffering is a daily experience for the Palestinian people; together through this exhibition they reveal together a message of Hope.

    CATALOG


    MY HOMELAND

    The works of seven established Iraqi artists - now living in different parts of the world – will be on display during the “My Homeland” exhibition, which will be taking place from 17 March until 17 April at Art Sawa, located within the Al Quoz district in Dubai.

    The exhibition, curated by Dia Azzawi, one of the participating artists, will showcase the works of Nazar Yahya, Kareem Risan, Mahmoud Obaidi, Ghassan Ghaieb, Ahmed Bahrani and Rafa Al-Nasiri, whose pieces of art reflect the vision of Iraq as a memory of recent daily life in the form of all objects of art.

    Amel B.Makkawi, Founder of Art Sawa, says: “My Homeland is a valuable contribution to the artistic agenda as the exhibition presents an excellent platform for these prominent Iraqi artists to share their memories and experiences, highlighting their feelings towards the catastrophic events that occur daily in different Iraqi cities.”

    Numerous techniques and variety of materials have been used to produce a diverse body of work for this unique exhibition, each piece of which traces and explores the path of the artists’ childhood memories, as well as the mythology and history of Iraq.

    Azzawi says: “Since the beginning of the Eighties, numerous artists and intellectuals started leaving Iraq. The trend continued after the first Gulf War as a result of harsh sanctions and, after the occupation in 2003, a new wave of emigrations followed.

    “I initiated this exhibition to enable Iraqi artists from across the globe to explore their feelings towards their homeland. The result is a unique exhibition that traces and explores the heritage of a country without humiliations and failures.”

    “More than abstract objects of art, these pieces convey the culture, heritage and reality of the Iraqi society, expressing sincere human feelings while elevating our perception and understanding of fine arts,” explains Makkawi. “Every artwork deals with the concerns of daily life in a country under occupation, and serves as a spiritual voyage that not only invites feelings of deep sadness, but also feelings of hope for the artists’ homeland.” 

    Makkawi continues: “In setting up Art Sawa, it was my vision to create a space where people could freely interact and discuss the issues raised through art, and I am extremely honoured and privileged to be hosting this important exhibition, which highlights the plight of the people of Iraq.” 

    CATALOG

    FINGERS & THINGS | KHALED ABDULWAHED


  • Artists : KHALED ABDULWAHED 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 28 September 2009
  • Start Date : 28 September 2009 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 28 October 2009 Time : 10:00 PM

    FINGERS & THINGS

    Khaled’s work is inspired by ordinary objects, which act as a catalyst to create intense – and sometimes uncomfortable moods.

    In his “Things” studies for example, seemingly mundane ‘subjects’ are portrayed as overpoweringly solitary, giving a sense of aimlessness and melancholy isolation.

    In “Fingers”, the artist’s almost obsessive exploration of human digits takes him into the realms of outlandish surrealism which teases the spirit, but provides no punchlines.

    Despite the compulsive forces that inform his work, Khaled’s technique – a bold contradiction of technique and naivety – imbues all his work with a unique charm and humor that leaves the viewer feeling positive and strangely liberated. 

    CATALOG

    UNDERCURRENT | CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN ART


  • Start Date : 14 May 2009 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 14 July 2009 Time : 10:00 PM

    UNDERCURRENT | CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN ART

    Under the joint patronage of H.E. Abdul Rahman Mohammad Al Owais, Minister of Culture, Youth & Community Development, UAE and the Guest of Honour, H.E. Farouk Hosny, Minister of Culture of Egypt. The exhibition is also supported by Dubai Culture and Arts Authority.

    Artists: AHMED ASKALANY, AHMED EL SHAER, AHMED NAWAR, ARMEN AGOP, ATEF AHMED IBRAHIM, ATTIAT SAYED, EHAB ELLABAN, ESLAM ZEIN, ESSAM MAROUF, FATHI AFIFI, GEORGE AZMY, HANAFY MAHMOUD, HANAN EL SHEIKH, HAYTHAM NAWAR, HAZEM EL MESTIKAWY, HEND ADNAN, HOWAIDA EL SEBAEE, IBRAHIM EL DESSOUKI, KHALED SOROUR, MAHA MAAMOUN, MARWA ADEL, MOHAMED ABLA, MOHAMED AL FAYOUMI, MOHAMED ZAYAN, MOHSEN SHAALAN, NAGLA SAMIR, RANDA SHAATH, SOBHI GUERGUES, WAEL DARWESH

    “Undercurrent” showcases the works of a group of 29 selected Egyptian artists, both well-established and at the cutting-edge of the Egyptian art scene. The exhibition takes its inspiration from the city of Cairo, with its exuberant energy, continuously stretching boundaries, and complex social and economic environment. The artworks reflect the impact of all these dynamics on the art and culture of contemporary Egypt.

    The exhibition is a valuable contribution to the region’s artistic agenda, as it highlights a number of outstanding Egyptian artists,” said Amel B. Makkawi, Founder of artsawa in Dubai. “Hosting this exhibition in the UAE draws our two cultures together and closer. Both Dubai and Cairo’s growth demonstrate an impact and electric energy, although each originating in entirely different sources. One rooted in millennia of history and civilization, of human artistic expression dating back thousands of years, the other emanating from a small trading community that in a moment of great opportunity decided to stand up and be counted, to create a major 21st Century hub for commerce, finance, transportation, media, and arts.”

    H.E. Abdul Rahman Al Owais commented “This exhibition presents an excellent platform for Egyptian and Emirati artists to interact and share experiences and creative ideas, which further highlights the depth of the ever-growing relationship that has for centuries brought Egypt and the UAE together, especially in literary and artistic arenas.”

    Hosting an art exhibition of this size and value in the UAE serves as recognition of the emergence of the country as an important contributor to contemporary art. The creative art works of artists from the Emirates are becoming a regional language understood by broad segments of the UAE’s citizens and residents, and have become an extraordinary ambassador for the country’s values, cultural heritage and creativity. 

    More than abstract works signed by artists, these pieces of art convey the culture, heritage and reality of the Egyptian society, further instilling the mission of art as means to bring cultures closer together, express sincere human feelings and elevate our perception and understanding of fine arts.

    Through these wonderful pieces, the Egyptian artists try to describe the small details of the Egyptian culture, which visitors will surely enjoy. This is undoubtedly a great opportunity to learn more about the Egyptian school of contemporary arts. This is where the creative talents of Egyptian and Emirates artists meet and blend in great harmony that creates deeper understanding and credibility of the realities and distinct qualities of life in these two countries.

    “This exhibition is an important initiative, one where both established and up-and-coming Egyptian artists display their work, in a generous gesture destined to propel the Arab art movement to the prospects it so deserves. I commend artsawa and this collective of artists for this endeavour,” H.E. Farouk Hosny added.

    True to its vision which values the role of art as a universal language, and reflecting the artistic scene in the UAE, which has become a highly sought-after international destination for the arts, artsawa celebrates the occasion with its first publication featuring the artists and their artworks. 

    CATALOG

    CHILDREN OF THE WORLD | RACHID KHIMOUNE


  • Artists : RACHID KHIMOUNE 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 19 March 2009
  • Start Date : 19 March 2009 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 10 May 2009 Time : 11:00 PM

    CHILDREN OF THE WORLD

    Under the joint patronage of His Excellency Mr. Alain Azouaou, Ambassador of France to the UAE and of the Dubai Culture and Art Authority, artsawa showcases an exhibition on a scale rarely seen in Dubai. “Children of the World” is a monumental collection of sculptures by the renowned French artist Rachid Khimoune. 

    The work comprises twenty-one remarkable bronze-cast sculptures depicting twenty-one children from all over the world, twenty-one being a metaphor for the 21st century in which the works were created.  Rachid Khimoune’s artistic approach is rich, unique, and contemporary and appeals to an international audience: the artist has traveled the world searching for the original roots of his subjects and their cities.

    This is a truly inspirational and universal project and is particularly relevant to the youthful city of Dubai, UAE, where it will stand as a symbol of the complex relationship between art, history and the city’s diverse urban communities. The UAE, with its vibrant and multicultural human landscape, is the ideal and natural host for this great work of art.

    The scope of this exhibition befits the nature of Rachid Khimoune’s art: over eight years of creation, travel and immersion in the urban components of twenty-one international cities have resulted in an extraordinary body of work. “Children of the World” explores and uncovers the diversity of the world’s people and is as inimitable as the different cultures it portrays.

    Each piece is layered with the stories of cities and their people, and these became embedded in each cast as a visual expression of a historical and human archive. He has captured “the skins of the streets”, molded their paving stones, drain covers and broken bitumen to produce works of art quite unlike any other.

    The urban theme is the central focus and the inspiration of his work. Khimoune explains, “Although all streets seem to be the same, sewer plants and grids around trees are as different from one city to another as tattoos on skin. These are the symbols that represent identity and document the history or memory of the city.”

    CATALOG

    17|02|09 | AHMED ASKALANY


  • Artists : AHMED ASKALANY 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 17 February 2009
  • Start Date : 17 February 2009 Time : 10:00 AM
  • End Date : 10 March 2009 Time : 11:00 PM

    17 | 02 | 09 | AHMED ASKALANY

    Critics and art connoisseurs alike have described Ahmed Askalany as one of the most unique and inimitable sculptors of his generation. Making his Dubai debut on the 17th February at Art Sawa, Askalany will be exhibiting his latest collection of emotive sculptures entitled “17-02-09 | Ahmed Askalany.” 
     
    Speaking about his latest exhibition Askalany commented, “My philosophy is simplicity, to convey the idea directly to the viewer without overcomplicating the message with too much detail. I’m extremely excited to be able to show my latest works to the people of the UAE.” 
    Known for utilizing methods associated with the ancient cultures of Egypt, Askalany uses woven palm leaves and resin that gives his work an essential association with his native roots. His subjects include human figures and animals that are both inspired and representative of his native town, Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The figurines are characterized by a preserved, mummified look. Nonetheless, the work retains a profound nature and sense of innocence. There is no specific formula that Askalany uses when creating his works of art, the final piece often represents this by becoming humorous or naïve but always with a poetic sensitivity.
     
    Arguably the only artist who maintains a connection with traditional forms and materials, this bond with traditional elements that would act as a restriction on others expression is, for Askalany, vital to maintain the link to his roots. This connection allows his work to become unique and unmistakable, yet, at the same time, does not stop him being thoroughly up to date. 

    CATALOG

    PUBLIC SPACE | ZENA ASSI


  • Artists : ZENA ASSI 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 19 January 2009
  • Start Date : 20 January 2009 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 14 February 2009 Time : 10:00 PM

    PUBLIC SPACE

    Assi chooses to completely fill her canvases with interwoven lines set against bold fields of color abstractions. It is this unique style that has proven to be so popular amongst the region’s art lovers, not only in her solo exhibition in Beirut, but also as a resident artist at Dubai’s artsawa where she has been regularly featured during the gallery’s collective exhibitions.  
     
    Born in Tripoli, Assi now lives and works in Beirut where she creates her nonpareil works of art. As a relatively new artist, she held her first solo exhibition, Cité et Citadins (City and Citizens) in Beirut last year. The show featured various paintings in mixed media on canvas and introduced her distinctive style of elongated melancholic figures and cluttered cityscapes.
     
    Speaking about her latest exhibition Assi commented, “I’m extremely proud to be able to showcase my works to the art lovers of Dubai. I’m aware that not many young artists get the opportunity to hold such an exhibition in a gallery as impressive as artsawa and in a region such as Dubai which appears to be fast becoming the hub of Art and Culture in the Middle East.”
     
    The exhibition is to be held at artsawa in Al Quoz which has already gained a reputation as being one of the most active art platforms in Dubai, playing host to five exhibitions since the inaugural opening in October 2008. A converted warehouse of some 12,000 square feet, it promises to provide the perfect backdrop for Zena Assi’s latest creations.

    CATALOG

    12|11|08 | SAME STORY… DIFFERENT PEOPLE | ESSAM MAROUF


  • Artists : ESSAM MAROUF 
  • Venue : ARTSAWA | ALQUOZ
  • Preview : 12 November 2008
  • Start Date : 12 November 2008 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 15 January 2009 Time : 10:00 PM

    12|11|08 | SAME STORY… DIFFERENT PEOPLE

    Essam Marouf, an internationally recognised portrait artist will be exhibiting his latest collection of works at the brand new artsawa gallery in Al Quoz, Dubai from 12th November 2008.

    Born in 1958, Cairo, Egypt, Essam Marouf has showcased his works all over the world, with exhibitions including, “Eeuwig Kwetsbaar” at the Provinciaal Museum Begijnhofkerk St. Truiden in Belgium and “Um Kalthoum" at the L’Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France. His unique portrait interpretations are sure to be a hit in the region and this latest exhibition, which marks the first time that he has had an exhibition in the UAE, represents a special opportunity for the region’s art lovers.  According to Marouf, who now divides his time between Egypt and the Netherlands, “The portrait never went out of fashion.”

    Speaking about his forthcoming exhibition at artsawa he commented, “It is probably the favourite subject of all in the history of painting and artists still see possibilities to create something new when reproducing the human head. In addition, the portrait has always been an opportunity for stories or reflections and I’m extremely excited to be able to show my latest portrait works to the people of the region.”

    The portrait has always been and still remains the preferred subject for Essam Marouf. His works are characterized by clear precision of form and the absence of any visible references to paint texture. However, he is able to express a degree of sensitivity in the face aided by the application of clear tones and the way in which the canvasses’ structure is suggested. Marouf’s works are solidly two-dimensional and maintain minimal anatomy with a Byzantine frontality, a dramatic immediacy that can be found in the works of Giotto and Warhol. 

    This will be the first solo exhibition to be shown at the brand new artsawa gallery in Al Quoz.

    CATALOG

    INAUGURAL EXHIBITION


  • Start Date : 22 October 2008 Time : 11:00 AM
  • End Date : 10 November 2008 Time : 10:00 PM

    INAUGURAL EXHIBITION
     
    Artists: MOHAMMED ABLA| AHMED AL BAHRANI| MAHMOUD OBAIDI| HANI ALQAM| AHMED ASKALANY| ZENA ASSI| WAEL DARWESH| IBRAHIM EL DESSOUKI| MANSOUR EL HABRE| MAHMOUD HANAFY| RACHID KHIMOUNE| ESSAM MAROUF| MOHAMMAD EL RAWAS| ALI RAZA| CAMILLE ZAKHARIA
      
    Under the Patronage of His Excellency Dr. Omar Bin Sulaiman, Governor, Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and Managing Director of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority, Dr. Lamees Hamdan Al Shamsi, Board Member of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority on the 22nd of October 2008 opened artsawa, a contemporary art gallery located in Dubai.
    Nestled within the industrial area in the Al Quoz district within a transformed warehouse, artsawa, is dedicated to promoting world-class regional contemporary art to a global audience. With an inspiring, interactive space for artists, and art-lovers, the gallery is all set to become the hub of contemporary art in Dubai.
     
    Commenting on the opening, H.E. Dr Omar Bin Sulaiman said, “We welcome the launch of this new gallery, which contributes to Dubai’s efforts to create a world-class infrastructure for art and culture. The Dubai Culture and Arts Authority wholeheartedly supports Initiatives such as artsawa, which help to create a rich environment for art to flourish. By providing a platform for artists to showcase their art and connect with the community, artsawa adds great value to Dubai’s cultural and artistic scene”.
     Dr. Lamees Hamdan Al Shamsi said: “The opening of artsawa will help to enhance appreciation and awareness of contemporary Arab art both in Dubai and the larger region. The gallery will serve to encourage both established and promising artists, and raise exposure for their works among art connoisseurs, collectors and investors in the region. Initiatives like this will enable art and artists to play larger roles in shaping and guiding the society.”   
     
    artsawa was conceived by its owner, Amel Makkawi. Having recognised the potential in the market for serious art, Makkawi set out to create a platform for artistic talent from across the region. Amel has built a reputation for selecting and promoting Arab artists who have extraordinary and individual stories to tell through their art. The opening event featured the works of renowned Arab artists such as Mohamed Abla, Ahmed Askalany, Ibrahim el Dessouki, Mahmoud al Obaidi, Camille Zakharia.
     
    Speaking about the gallery, Amel commented, “artsawa is the embodiment of my dreams and aspirations for the promotion of art in the region. The English translation of “sawa” in spoken Arabic is “together” and on that theme, artsawa will facilitate the interaction between art and the public across a wide range of media.  Our mission is dedicated to promoting world class contemporary art from the region among a global audience.”
    Set in a warehouse that has been transformed into a distinctive state-of-the-art 12,000 sq ft art platform with over 3,000 ft of linear wall-space, artsawa promises to be the perfect backdrop to showcase the works of the region’s contemporary artists. The beautiful gallery area combines with a library and video lounge to provide an inviting, personal space for artists and art enthusiasts to interact.
     
    Amel continued, “Art comes from the soul and is key to documenting the story of the individual artist’s real life experiences, it is a reflection of our society. artsawa will provide the perfect platform for these stories to be told and for everyone to enjoy.”
     
    artsawa will realise its mission by hosting of a series of innovative exhibitions. With up to 15 exhibitions annually, it will not only be one of the largest but also most active art platforms in the UAE and the region,  In addition, artsawa will have educational programs and publications that address current issues and practices in the Art world.