ast Forward: ABU DHABI

Listen at art fairs around the world, and you’ll hear the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on everyone’s lips. With the construction of a modern art museum by Frank Gehry, a classical art museum by Jean Nouvel, a maritime museum by Tadao Ando and possibly a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid, all on its agenda—as well as an arts park—the capital city is aggressively building itself into a regional hub for global art.

Perhaps most visibly, in 2012 the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is scheduled to join its counterparts in New York, Las Vegas, Venice, Berlin and Bilbao as part of the world network of Guggenheim Museums. Like Bilbao, it will be designed by Frank Gehry, but, at nearly three times the size, it will be the largest Guggenheim in the world, with ample room for permanent collections, special exhibitions, a center for art and technology, a children’s art education center, a library and research center and a conservation lab.

What hasn’t been fully determined is the extent to which the creativity of the UAE and its neighbors will appear in the Guggenheim’s vast spaces.

“Our objective is to make the museum relevant to the region,” says Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation and head of the partnership with Shaykh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, chair of the emirate’s Tourism Development and Investment Company. But with the project yet to break ground, “we are still at the beginning stages of what we want this museum to be.”

More controversial has been the emirate’s plan to collaborate with the Louvre on Jean Nouvel’s classical art museum, which some in France’s art elite have criticized for appearing to be motivated more by economics than artistic or cultural strategy.

However, Art Paris—the largest annual contemporary-art fair in France—is franchising an annual sale in the emirate with unabashed business and cultural ambitions, the latest of what are now more than half a dozen major regular arts events. In late November, some of the world’s leading galleries will convene in Abu Dhabi bearing works of western masters from Picasso and Matisse right through today’s rising Gulf-region artists, giving the UAE a home-turf view of “the extent of the panorama of art around the world,” says Caroline Lacoste, co-founder of Art Paris. Under the patronage of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Shaykh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the event is part of the emirate’s strategy to build up art appreciation.

The roots of Abu Dhabi’s arts scene go back to the early 1980’s and the opening of the Abu Dhabi Culture and Heritage Authority (ADCH) and its Cultural Foundation. From the Spanish tenor José Carreras to 19th-century European orientalist paintings, a variety of exhibits, workshops, lectures, concerts, films and festivals has made the Cultural Foundation a haven for artists and art-lovers and a prototype for emerging events on a blockbuster scale.

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reativity and Entrepreneurship: Dubai

In the shadows of Dubai’s skyscrapers and cranes, from downtown’s Burj Dubai to the industrial belt of Al-Quoz, more than 20 art galleries have sprouted within the region’s fastest-growing city, mostly over the last seven years. Each helps Dubai develop its identity as a multicultural society, one whose creative spirit and boomtown economy are attracting global attention.

The Majlis Gallery was Dubai’s first, opened in 1978 by interior designer Alison Collins in Bastakia, the oldest part of the city, now a tranquil urban oasis of largely restored mud-brick buildings. A few doors away, Canadian expatriate Mona Hauser opened XVA in 1993; today it is a gallery, hotel and restaurant, a place for “exhibiting new talent,” she says, “that is more about art and creativity than about profit.”

Among the city’s new-arrival galleries, one that has quickly earned a formidable international reputation is The Third Line, a partnership between Iranian Sunny Rahbar, American Claudia Cellini and Emirati Omar Ghobash that opened its doors in 2005. The warehouse-style space stages exhibitions, discussions, book readings and film screenings. Exhibiting art from the greater Middle East and by expatriate Arabs as well as local artists, Rahbar is looking forward to the further flourishing of homegrown Emirati art. “As the art market continues to grow, so will the local art scene,” she says. “Emirati collectors are buying more and more—not only international and regional art but also pieces by artists closer to home. Is it just a trend? I doubt it.”

True to Dubai’s reputation as a trading hub, the blossoming galleries have been joined by leading auction houses. While buyers from the Gulf have been regular visitors to auctions of both western and Islamic art in London, Paris and New York, there is now strong interest in local art markets. Having opened its Dubai office in 2005, London-based Christie’s auction house held its third sale at the end of October and surpassed its current gross sales of $6.1 million for contemporary art from Iran and the Arab world. In hot pursuit, Sotheby’s, too, is setting up shop, and in London in October held its first sale dedicated to contemporary art from the broader Middle East region. “Today most capital cities in the Middle East and North Africa have burgeoning art scenes,” explains Edward Gibbs, head of Sotheby’s Islamic and Indian Department in London.

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odernity Meets Tradition: Sharjah

Contemporary art is often described as a form of social comment that confronts viewers with what they don’t know, or with what they do know but in a way they don’t expect. Since 1987 Sharjah has become home to 16 museums, and it has attracted an impressive population of artists.

One leading contemporary space lies within Qanat Al-Qasba, a complex that blends entertainment with culture, and where one can see how artists do their own blending of heritage and modernity, past and future. From Bedouin crafts, poetry and storytelling through today’s contemporary practices, “art has always been a source of enjoyment for the Emirati people and part of the deep-rooted culture of this country,” says Arwa Lootah, events manager of Qanat Al-Qasba Development Authority, whose recent “Emirati Dimensions” show encouraged 35 young local artists to show alongside established regional names.

It was in 1979, eight years after the unification of the UAE, that the Emirates Fine Arts Society opened in Sharjah. Today, it is the UAE’s oldest arts organization, and most of its more than 50 members were born and raised in one of the seven emirates. The collection of catalogs from its annual shows is now a record of how Emirati artistic expression has matured and diversified over nearly three decades.

What has really put Sharjah on the international map is the Sharjah Biennial, founded in 1993, which has brought works by hundreds of international artists to venues across the city. The biennial’s themes are bold by any standard, from 2005’s self-critique of “biennialism” to this year’s ecological focus. The latter show included local pieces such as Mona Hatoum’s neon-red earth, Khaled Hafez’s metaphorical “Visions of Contaminated Memory” and Huda Saeed Saif’s premier video installation that scrutinized the quarrying of the mountains in the northern UAE that are providing, stone by stone, the foundations for such huge offshore projects as The Palms and The World.

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nvesting 101: Qatar

The Qatari capital Doha is positioning itself, too, both as a trustee of Islamic artistic heritage and as an incubator of innovative expression. Along Doha’s waterfront, the Museum of Islamic Art, scheduled to open in March and designed by the Chinese–American architect I. M. Pei, is set to boost Qatar into the global museum circuit with a rich collection from the golden age of Islamic art and its legacies.

In contemporary art, Qatar’s position is reflected not so much in galleries as in its investment in arts education. Since 2001, the School of Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar (VCUQ) has educated 132 young women in interior design, graphic design and fashion. Jochen Sokoly, assistant professor of art history and director of the school’s gallery, who also served as a consultant to the Al Sabah Collection of Islamic Art in Kuwait, curated this spring “The Bauhaus Interior,” which for the first time brought vintage furniture, objects, drawings and photographs by leading Bauhaus designers and craftspeople to the Middle East. The exhibit “generated a lot of interest, particularly when you consider that the movement took root in Germany at a time when the country had just experienced tremendous social and cultural changes,” he says. “In a way, there is a similarity with Qatar.”

This fall, the gallery’s “Self-Representation in the Arabian Gulf” features Lebanese photographer Camille Zakharia, Kuwaiti–Palestinian Tarek Al-Ghoussein and Bahrain’s Anas Al-Shaikh as well as VCUQ students. “Slowly but surely, they are contributing to the contemporary field. You have to remember that we are training creative individuals, not just designers and artists,” says Sokoly.

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ridging Time: Bahrain

As the seat of the Dilmun civilization, the island kingdom of Bahrain is well known for its archeological wealth. Among the best-known preservationists is heritage assistant under-secretary Shaykha Mai bint Mohammed Al-Khalifa, whose efforts have helped safeguard many of Bahrain’s older buildings, including Bahrain’s World Heritage Site museum, Qal‘at al Bahrain, which is scheduled to open in February.

The island’s contemporary arts scene is led by a trio of galleries. La Fontaine was restored by the French designer Jean Marc Sinan and is owned today by Fatima Alireza, who runs the 19th-century “château” as a center for contemporary art, restaurant, dance studio and health spa that celebrates its fifth anniversary this year. In that time its walls have been hung with art from countries as diverse as Iran and Chile. “There are no limits to what I can do here,” says Alireza. “This place lives and breathes art.” La Fontaine’s exhibit this fall, “Doors to Yemen: 3,000 Years of Art and Civilisation,” takes visitors to the frankincense kingdoms.

In the leafy Adliya district of Manama, Bayan Al Barak Kanoo is searching for artists with something to say. Even if visitors walk into her gallery and don’t like it, she says, she believes Al Riwaq Gallery nonetheless has a responsibility to open people’s eyes to challenging things. The gallery also hosts a bookshop and a program of workshops. Exhibitions have included the social documentary photography of the “Moving Walls” touring exhibition; colorful private deliberations on canvas by Bahrain’s Abdul Rahim Sherif; and four photographers’ views in “Visions of Palestine”— all of which have helped Kanoo break down boundaries between local and global artistic expression.

A stone’s throw from Al Riwaq is Al Bareh Gallery, which owner Hayfeh Al Jishi says encourages fresh perspectives by serving as a bridge that brings together cultures, styles and trends. Like the other galleries on the island, Al Bareh celebrates the international in art. Early this year, for example, Al Jishi hosted more than 100 sculptures from Zimbabwe and, more recently, the second show in a series called “Contemporary Calligraphy,” which provided an overview of the work of Arab artists from Syria’s Khaled Al Saai to Morocco’s Hakim Ghazali.

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ushing Boundaries: Oman

Enveloped by mountains and facing the sea, Oman’s capital, Muscat, is so committed to the faithful preservation of Islamic architectural practice that its skyline remains untainted by steel towers to this day. In art, orientalist paintings of the 19th century still enjoy a strong popular vote. Is there a place here for contemporary art?

The artists of the Muscat-based Circle group think so, and this past May, the group, founded in 2000, held its fourth local biennial, showing work by 26 regional artists throughout the city in galleries and on street posters and public projection screens—including one that invited passersby to show their own images from Bluetooth-enabled mobile-phone cameras.

Also since 2000, Bait Muzna Gallery has shown contemporary Omani and international artists. Speaking in the gallery in the renovated former home of one of the members of Oman’s royal family, owner Sayyida Susan Al Said is confident. “We are trying to open people’s eyes and show the relevance of contemporary work,” she says. “Omani artists are very keen to gain exposure, and our gallery is moving toward the contemporary field.” In November, Bait Muzna will take contemporary Omani art north to Art Paris in Abu Dhabi.

Artist Radhika Khimji, who recently finished her master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Art in London, is similarly upbeat. “The contemporary art scene has been going through a lot of changes,” she says. “Video and installation works by the likes of Anwar Sonja and Hassan Meer are cutting-edge and deeply relevant not only to Oman but to the international art scene as a whole. This is not ‘Omani art,’” she adds. “Works must be allowed to be shown simply as contemporary work.” Asked how one can move beyond a restrictive national label, Khimjij replies, “You should never underestimate the audience.”

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urturing New Expression: Saudi Arabia

Contemporary artistic practice, in order to take root, requires not only artists but also galleries, collectors and support from both private and public sectors in the form of art museums, artist-run spaces, project grants and exhibit sponsorship. Firmly committed to the preservation of Islamic heritage—as seen most recently in Prince Walid bin Talal’s support of the Louvre’s Islamic-art wing—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is also opening new opportunities for creative expression in all those areas.

At the two-year-old Hewar Art Gallery, overlooking an unbroken urban vista of central Riyadh from the 52nd floor of the iconic Kingdom Tower, manager Mohammad Al Sa’awy sees a growing audience for art in the kingdom. “With the help of galleries and the increasing number of collectors of contemporary art in the kingdom, we hope to finally reach out.” He’s also keen on the burgeoning strength of Saudi talent, noting the recent formation of a Council for Cultural Artists and the prospects for its members to benefit from the art-market boom in the Gulf. (To that end, Hewar has posted samples of several artists’ work on its Web site.)

To the west in Jiddah, Al Mansouria Foundation for Culture and Creativity is another organization that is energizing contemporary art not only in Saudi Arabia, but also across the Middle East. Founded in the late 1990’s by Princess Jawaher bint Majed bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa‘ud to build bridges between Saudi artists and the public, it is lending support to such artists as Abdullah Al Shaikh, Taha Al Sabban, Shadia Alem, Faisal Samra, Abdullah Hammas, Mahdi Al Jeraibi and Zaman Jassim. It is also under-writing exhibitions in the kingdom and abroad and publishing books, and has acquired some 250 works that comprise the kingdom’s first permanent collection of contemporary art.

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