SIAF 2023-24.. Photo by Elvira Bojadzic. © Islamic Arts Magazine
The 25th edition of SIAF affirmed the importance of highlighting Islamic arts through Emirati, Arab, and international contributions, and openness to diverse experiences from all countries worldwide.
Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival contributes to enhancing the presence of Islamic art under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah, affirming the importance of arts as a bridge to bring people together and communicate through a unified language of creativity and art.
The 25th Edition was themed ‘Manifestations’, a word laden with profound aesthetic and intellectual significance, open to multiple interpretations varying among artists. Thus, the festival embraced diverse artistic expressions to encapsulate the theme’s vitality through various artistic presentations while preserving the intrinsic authenticity of Islamic arts.
Throughout the festival, 132 events took place, including exhibitions, art workshops, and lectures organized by the Department of Culture in collaboration with 18 entities in Sharjah. These include institutions like the House of Wisdom, Arab Photographers’ Union, Photographic Society, Emirates Fine Arts Society, and other cultural venues in Sharjah.
From the 25th Edition of SIAF / Courtesy of SIAF
The visitors had an opportunity to explore 47 exhibitions housed by the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah Calligraphy Museum, Khorfakkan Amphitheatre, Kalba Beach, Emirates Society for Arabic Calligraphy and Islamic Ornamentation, and other exhibition venues.
SIAF presented 50 artists from 25 Arab countries, prominently led by the UAE. Other contributions extended across various Arab nations such as Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Jordan, alongside foreign countries like Spain, Poland, Turkey, Colombia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Argentina, Japan, Russia, Kazakhstan, and more. These artists presented 319 artworks encompassing installations, calligraphy, murals, and paintings in authentic calligraphy and decoration. SIAF hosted 81 artistic workshops and over 80 guests, including media personalities, lecturers, calligraphers, and supervisors of art workshops.
It is also worth mentioning the parallel solo exhibitions within the festival, including ‘Sakeenat Al Harf’ by Emirati artist Abdulqader Al Rais at the Sharjah Calligraphy Museum, ‘Manifestations of a Verse’ by Moroccan artist Abderrahim Koulam in the calligraphy square, and ‘Gems of Letters’ by Turkish artist Farhad Gurlu at the calligraphy square.
Among the showcased artworks were the piece by Saudi artist Raghad Al Ahmad titled “The Night of Destiny” at the 1971 Design Space, ‘Eternal Gates: The Journey of Manifestation’ by Emirati artist Abdullah Al Neyadi at Kalba Beach, and the collaborative artwork ‘Hand in Hand with Sharjah’ by Kaz Shirane from Japan and Diana Nin from the United States.
Moreover, the House of Wisdom hosted several works including ‘Manifestations of the Soul’ by Kuwaiti artist Jasem Al Naseeb, ‘Shelter’ by UK-based artist Toy Studio, ‘Power of One’ by US-based Studio Choi+Shine, and various other artworks displayed across different areas in Sharjah.
The Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival (SIAF) once again proved to be one of the most important events to showcase Islamic arts and arts by contemporary artist that are influenced by Islamic art principles.
.. Photo by Elvira Bojadzic. © Islamic Arts Magazine
Alserkal will celebrate the importance of contemporary art with the return of Alserkal Art Week, running from 3-13 March 2022. With a line-up that includes some of the most important experimental artists of the moment, the 20+ exhibitions on show in Alserkal Avenue include Dubai’s first ambisonic sound exhibition presented by Alserkal Arts Foundation in Concrete. The gallery’ exhibitions in Alserkal Avenue include artists working across a wide range of mediums and with diverse materials: from digital work such as NFTs, film and photography to sculpture and large-scale artworks. Highlights include the first West Asian major solo exhibition of Jitish Kallat at Ishara Art Foundation; a large-scale exhibition by Wim Delvoye in Leila Heller Gallery; and a multidisciplinary show with filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige in The Third Line’s newly renovated gallery.
The public is invited to visit more than 20 ground-breaking and rigorous contemporary art exhibitions, all located within a 150-metre radius within walking distance of each other inside Alserkal Avenue. The exhibitions will open during Alserkal Lates on Tuesday, 8 March, when the galleries will stay open until 10 pm. Visitors will have the opportunity to meet the artists and gallerists and to join artist- and curator-led tours. Beyond the exhibitions, Alserkal has programmed a line-up of thought-provoking talks, guest projects, public realm commissions and open studios throughout Alserkal Art Week to spark dialogue around contemporary issues and provide cultural experiences for local, regional and international communities.
Alserkal Art Week, previous editions / Photo courtesy of Alserkal
Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, Founder of Alserkal and its initiatives, said, “For almost 15 years, the UAE has been at the epicentre of the growth of the region’s art scene. As our arts ecosystem collectively emerges post-Covid stronger than ever, it’s heartening to see the calibre of exhibitions and programmes on show across the UAE, including at Art Dubai, Sharjah Art Foundation and Art Jameel. I invite our audiences to take a moment to pause while they engage with the messages that these artists are sharing with us.”
Vilma Jurkute, Executive Director of Alserkal, added: “Alserkal Art Week reinforces the UAE’s position at the forefront of the region’s cultural scene with Alserkal playing an instrumental role through Alserkal Arts Foundation and a community of homegrown art galleries. This year, the line-up brings together some of the most prominent and influential artists today from the region and internationally, through rigorous and experimental exhibitions and programmes that continue to catalyse critical dialogue with our global and local publics.”
Alserkal Art Week, previous editions / Photo courtesy of Alserkal
A Slightly Curving Place brings an ambisonic sound installation to Dubai for the first time, immersing visitors in an experiential environment for careful and immersive listening. Curated by Nida Ghouse, the exhibition pushes the boundaries of a traditional exhibition and embraces new technologies while remaining sensitive to critical debates. Visitors are invited to spend time listening to the artworks within the exhibition, which will have late-night opening hours until 10 pm from Wednesday to Saturday through the run of the exhibition. It is the first large-scale exhibition in Concrete, the multidisciplinary space designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architects (OMA), since the Mohamed Melehi solo show in September 2020.
The exhibition will open on 3 March at 6.30 pm, with a guided tour by the curator. The exhibition will be accompanied by Coming to Know, a series of additional activations unfolding over Alserkal Art Week in response to A Slightly Curving Place. Organised by Nida Ghouse and Brooke Holmes, Professor of Post-classicisms at Princeton University, Coming to Know includes conversations, discussions, workshops, performative responses with exhibition collaborators and invited respondents, and exhibitions tours on 5 12, 19 and 22 March.
Alserkal Art Week, previous editions / Photo courtesy of Alserkal
Alserkal Art Week, previous editions / Photo courtesy of Alserkal
Alserkal Lates will occur in Alserkal Avenue on Tuesday, 8 March, from 10 am to 10 pm. The opening of more than 20 new exhibitions underscores the importance of the UAE within the region’s art scene, with shows focusing on local and regional artists and their multidisciplinary practices. Artist-and-curator-led tours of the galleries and A Slightly Curving Place by Alserkal Arts Foundation will take place during Alserkal Lates. Majlis Talks will explore critical contemporary issues across the cultural realm. This edition of Alserkal Art Week will see conversations between filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Michael Sailstorfer, Wim Delvoye and Ian Abell. Janine Gaëlle Dieudji, Curator of the large-scale public artworks that currently adorn Alserkal Avenue, will be in conversation with artist Augustine Paredes about his latest works currently on show. Majlis Talks will be from 4.30 pm – 7.30 pm in The Yard, Alserkal Avenue. This Alserkal Art Week will also feature a Collectors’ Salon within Alserkal Avenue.
Alserkal Arts Foundation’s 2022 Spring Cycle Residents are a multidisciplinary cohort that includes filmmaker Iram Ghufran, artist Sophie Cundale, researcher Anahi Alviso-Marino, and writer Skye Arundhati Thomas, will each have Open Studios during Alserkal Lates on 8 March, alongside a public programme during their time in Dubai.
Guest projects in Alserkal Avenue include Wamda: a Glimpse, a retrospective by UAE Unlimited, on show in warehouse 1, and a showcase from Athr Gallery, based in Jeddah.
Eleven galleries from Alserkal Avenue will also participate in Art Dubai, including Ayyam Gallery, Carbon 12, Custot Gallery Dubai, Elmarsa Gallery, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Green Art Gallery, Leila Heller Gallery, Lawrie Shabibi, The Third Line, Volte Art Projects and Zawyeh Gallery.
Pictet is the Lead Partner of Alserkal Art Week.
Alserkal Art Week, previous editions / Photo courtesy of Alserkal
Alserkal Art Week, previous editions / Photo courtesy of Alserkal
Earth Chronicles, Group exhibition featuring Benitha Persical, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, G R Iranna, Rina Banerjee, Sonia Khurana, Sudarshan Shetty, Tallur L N, Vivek Vilasini (8 March – 30 April 2022)
A Slightly Curving Place (3 March -22 March 2022, on view in Concrete, Alserkal Avenue)
Safwan Dahoul (opening on 8 March 2022)
Michael Sailstorfer: Heavy Eyes (8 March – 5 May 2022)
New perspectives on Hungarian abstraction, a group exhibition featuring Bea Kusovszky, Márton Nemes, Gergő Szinyova (8 March – 14 March 2022)
Group exhibition: Sun Is Coming Up (on view until 20 March 2022)
Open studio during Alserkal Lates
Nja Mahdaoui: JAFR. The Alchemy of Signs (8 March 2022 – 7 May 2022)
Group exhibition Breaking Boundaries (on view until 15 April 2022)
Vikram Divecha: El Dorado (opening on 8 March 2022)
Nazgol Ansarinia: Lakes Drying, Tides Rising (opening on 8 March 2022)
Shreyas Karle: Shifting the Center Table (on view until 31 March 2022)
Group exhibition Lara Chahine and Reem Falaknaz (8 March – 15 April 2022)
Jitish Kallat: Order of Magnitude (on view until 1 July 2022)
Hamra Abbas: COLOR | GARDEN (8 March – 7 May 2022)
Solo exhibitions: Reza Derakshani, Wim Delvoye, Naeemeh Kazemi (Date TBC)
Mike Arnold: Odyssey (8 March – 27 March 2022)
Group exhibition Celebrating 10 years of Swatch Art Peace Hotel (on view until 31 March 2022)
Solo exhibition Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (opening 8 March 2022)
Group exhibition Wamda: A Glimpse (5 March – 13 March 2022)
The Guernica Project: Rahgava KK (on view until 16 April 2022)
Group exhibition Entangled Branches (8 March – 14 May 2022)
.. Photo by Elvira Bojadzic. © Islamic Arts Magazine
The presentation provides a glimpse into Ibrahim’s practice, comprising recent paintings, papier-mache and collage works, against the backdrop of an immersive installation of his seminal Lines drawings. It runs concurrently with Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim: Between Sunrise and Sunset, the artist’s major installation for The National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates at the 59th Venice Biennale. The exhibition, on view at Arsenale – Sale d’Armi in Venice until 27 November 2022, is a hall-filling piece comprising 128 abstract and organic elements in his signature medium of papier-mache.
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Untitled, 2016, Paper assemblage, 61 x 49.5 cm / Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi
I
brahim’s intensely experimental and prolific art practice conveys his deep fascination with memory, imagery and ways of seeing and experiencing the environment, coming from both his personal experiences and the kind of innate memory found in our DNA, which he describes as a ‘primitive urge.’ His work resonates with his deep connection to the natural environment of Khorfakkan, a rambling coastal town on the Gulf of Oman, enclosed on one side by the rocky Hajar Mountains and the other by the sea. His paintings and drawings are imbued with his form of language – inscriptions, lines and abstract forms that are reminiscent of ancient scripts – marking time and memory through meditative repetition.
For The Armory Show, Ibrahim recreates his immersive installation, originally presented as part of a group exhibition at the Kunstcentrum Sittard in the Netherlands in 1995 – his debut in Europe. Black typographic marks on the paper line the walls, from floor to ceiling, filling the entire space. Ibrahim’s fascination with the line traces back to his early childhood memories of markings on the gate walls of homes in his town. Single lines were drawn in charcoal to indicate the number of water bottles delivered. Leaving an imprint on his memory, these repeated lines – some reminiscent of ancient scripts, road marks or city skylines – have become the backbone of Ibrahim’s practice.
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Untitled, 2022 Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 183 cm / Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi / Photo by John Smith of Black Smith Photography
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Untitled, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 183 x 152 cm / Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi / Photo by John Smith of Black Smith Photography
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Bouquet 2, 2018 Cardboard boxes, papier-mache 83 x 40 x 26 cm / Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi / Photo by Ismael Noor of Seeing Things
Against the monochromatic backdrop of lines, a series of black and white papier-mache wall sculptures create the sensation of the marks materializing three-dimensionally from the walls. Part painting, part sculpture, Ibrahim’s sculptural experimentations have a primordial quality to them – a grouping of hand-moulded oblong shapes wedged with blocks of a card, bodies of paper hanging from strings or crushed into the shapes. Similarly, in his collages and assemblages, cut-out paper and card are arranged to create various compositions of the same repetitive black lines. At times minimal, at times complex, the works play with notions of multiplicity and division.
In parallel to these, Ibrahim presents four recent paintings, a continuation of his Symbols body of work. Large-scale, bright and textured, his canvases are populated with his emblematic abstract notations – an innate, instinctive script, meditatively repeated in an obsessive yet gentle manner, reconfigured and recoloured, much as the vertical marks in his Lines works.
Lastly, the presentation is centred on an arrangement of vibrant papier-mache sculptures. Some are anthropomorphic and dynamic – others emerge as organic plant-like forms, and some are toy-like. The brightly coloured sculptures are crafted from natural paper pigments combined by the artist, their vivid repeated lines of colour consistent with the obsessive mark-making of his practice, whilst the shapes reflect the natural formations of his domestic landscape. His choice of saturated and at times garish colour combinations seek to capture the “explosion in his eyes” he experienced when he first saw the sunset – until that moment a life lived beneath the Hajar Mountains had obstructed its view.
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim Three Black Lines, 2016 Sliced cardboard, papier-mache 47 x 35 x 4.5 cm / Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Untitled , 2016 Cardboard, papier-mache, twine, tarp 43 x 29 x 10 cm / Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Hanging Flowers, 2019 Cardboard, twine, papier-mache 45 x 42 x 15 cm / Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi / Photo by Ismael Noor of Seeing things
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim (b. 1962, UAE) is part of the UAE’s first generation of contemporary artists from the late 1980s, an avant-garde scene that includes Abdullah Al Saadi, Hussein Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, and the late Hassan Sharif.
Ibrahim is currently representing the United Arab Emirates at the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, in an exhibition entitled Between Sunrise and Sunset, curated by Maya Allison (Executive Director of The New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery) for the National Pavilion UAE. In March 2018 the Sharjah Art Foundation opened Elements, a survey of works spanning three decades of his practice, curated by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi. Other solo exhibitions include Embryonic Coat (2022) at Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, Dusk Till Dawn (2011) at Cromwell Place London with Lawrie Shabibi, Memory Drum (2020) and The Space between the Eyelid and the Eyeball (2019) at Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, and a series of solo shows at Cuadro Gallery, Dubai (2018, 2016, 2015, 2013).
Significant group exhibitions include participation in But We Cannot See Them: Tracing a UAE Art Community, 1988-2008 at The NYUAD Art Gallery (2017); The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Yay Gallery, Baku (2015); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (2016); the 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice (2009); the Sharjah Biennial (1993, 2003 and 2007); and the Dhaka Biennial (2002 and 1993). Institutional exhibitions include the Kunstmuseum, Bonn (2005); the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah (2005 and 1996), the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen (2002); Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (1998); Sittard Art Centre, the Netherlands (1995), and the Exhibition for the Emirates Fine Art Society in the Soviet Union, Moscow (1990).
Ibrahim’s public works include Falling Stones Garden (2020), Al Ula, Saudi Arabia, commissioned by the Royal Commission for Al Ula and Desert X; Grocery (2019), Madinat Zayed Market, Abu Dhabi, UAE, commissioned by Ghadan 21, Government of Abu Dhabi as part of the For Abu Dhabi initiative; Untitled (2019), Reem Central Park, Al Reem Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE, commissioned by Aldar Properties PJSC in partnership with Abu Dhabi Art; Kids’ Garden (2019), Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, Abu Dhabi, UAE, commissioned by Abu Dhabi Health Services Company; and Bait Al Hurma (2018), Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation as part of the exhibition Elements.
He received the first prize for sculpture at the Sharjah Biennial in 1999 and 2001 and has been a member of the Emirates Fine Arts Society since 1986, founding Art Atelier at the Khor Fakkan Art Centre in 1997. He has participated in artist residencies at Trans Indian Ocean Artist Exchange, Kochi Murzi Biennale, India (2016); A.i.R Dubai (2015); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2009) and Kunstcentrum Sittard, the Netherlands (1994-1996, 1998-2000). His works have been acquired by significant international collections, including Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah; Art Jameel Collection, Dubai; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Kunstcentrum Sittard, Sittard; The British Museum, London; and Le Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
He lives and works in Khorfakkan, United Arab Emirates.
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