The Artist’s Rooms, curated in collaboration with Jameel Arts collectibles artists, aims to showcase influential and innovative art practitioners from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
These series of exhibitions are collaborative and curated in dialogue with the artist. Autumn 2022 – Winter 2023 features rooms by Ayesha Sultana, Risham Syed, and Daniele Genadry in galleries 1, 2, and 3.
Artist’s Rooms: Ayesha Sultana
Gallery 1
Bringing together recent works on paper and paintings by artist Ayesha Sultana, the exhibition looks at the artist’s long-standing engagement with the materiality and experimentation in the pictorial space. Form Studies (2017) is a series of watercolor drawings that serve as quick sketches and proposals for installations, projects, or three-dimensional manifestations. Through these floating forms, inspired by the everyday materialism and iconography of her home city of Dhaka in Bangladesh, Sultana renders street corners and urban architectural aspects such as ledges, facades, staircases, and wall surfaces.
Artist’s Rooms: Daniele Genadry
Gallery 3
The artist’s room is based on the main painting by the multimedia artist Daniele Genadry, who lives and works between Paris, France, and Beirut, Lebanon, under the title “Blind Light” (2017), in addition to new works based on her recent research in la Rochelle, France, and the Grand Canyon, USA. Genadry focuses on distance, light, and movement and their effect on visual experiences. Her practice revolves around the relationship between painting and photography, exploring the potential of an image to generate its own temporality.
Artist’s Rooms: Risham Syed
Gallery 2
The exhibition presents the main installation work of the Lahore-based artist Risham Syed, The Seven Seas (2012), a series of large-scale quilts depicting 20th-century maps of various port cities that were strategically located on the colonial European trade route, such as Ras al-Khaimah in the UAE, Izmir in Turkey, Kandy in Sri Lanka, and many others. The artist connects the intricacies of contemporary geopolitics with the 19th and early 20th Century cotton trade of the British Empire. With fabric sourced from her travels to Turkey, Bangladesh, the UAE, Sri Lanka, the UK, India, and within her homeland Pakistan.
Night School 2023: Make History
January 8th – 29th, 2023 | Starting from 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM
(Please click on the link to browse the entire program)
In Dubai, you witness history being made. It happens most emphatically across the landscape and in the construction of towers, ports, roadways, and bridges. You could say that builders, architects, engineers, and planners are hired to write that history. And the work requires creative engagement with both the past and the future.
At Night School this year, we will encounter skyscrapers alongside the road on which history gets made.
A history filed inside halls of institutions, resurfaced during a garage renovation, concealed in the ground below, or sprouting from the landscape around us. Gathered in a city that arises through its connections to the world, we will examine how the evidence of Dubai’s history streams through places nearby and far.
Led by architect and writer Todd Reisz, Night School returns this year under the theme “Make History”. Local and international scholars will join a seminar of Dubai residents over three weeks in January to explore how history gets written and constructed in Dubai and the greater region.
The seminar will be held in English and met from January 8th until January 29th, on Sunday and Wednesday evenings at 7:00 p.m. There are also some planned evening film screenings.
Professionals, students, and everyone who is curious are welcome to register for the free course. No prior academic experience is necessary. The only requirements are a commitment to all seven seminar sessions and proficiency in reading English texts.
Submit your application before November 25. Accepted candidates will be contacted by December 10, 2022.
Todd Reisz, the author of Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2020), explores architecture’s packaging to sell Dubai on a global stage. At Jameel Arts Centre, he curated the exhibition Off Centre/On Stage (2021), wrote the eponymous publication (Khatt Books, 2021), and led the first Night School (2022). He also co-edited with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi Building Sharjah (Birkhäuser, 2021), an archival investigation of that city’s vanishing 20th-century landscape.
Workshops & Programs
Junior Tour and Workshop: Drawing Through the Galleries
January 8, 2023 | 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Exhibitions
For booking, please click on the link here
Drawing through the galleries follows a guided tour of the current exhibitions to learn about the artist’s themes, techniques, and styles, as well as a visit to the artist’s garden and insights into the unique way Jameel builds its library collection.
As children tour the centre, they learn various experiential drawing techniques to stimulate hand-eye coordination and ways of seeing. Drawing techniques include fragmented drawings, layered drawings, and continuous one-line activities.
The free workshop is held by Jameel Arts Centre’s Learning Coordinator Hadeel Al Heeti. Please pre-register due to the limited seats.
Currently Displaying
Exhibition: An Ocean in Every Drop
22 September 2022 to 2 April 2023
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop,” Jalal al-Din Rumi says in one of his poems, and he calls for complexity not only in our inner worlds; but in our water bodies, as we are connected in great and ancient ways to the rest of the world. Water molecules that formed billions of years ago travel through everything that is wet, from clouds to seas to our bodies, exiting them and starting a new constant cycle. However, this changes with each encounter, bringing with it new chemical elements and compounds. What we eat is expelled by bodily fluids, and at the same time, these bodies of water accumulate inside our bodies. What does this molecular interdependence do for our understanding of our bodies in the world?
Water is a force that produces history, culture, and social relations. Bodies of water have always sustained trade and empires and offered means of escape and refuge. How can we understand this life force through the myths and its anchoring of spiritual beliefs? Can connecting to a range of world views relating to bodies of water as living beings transform our own approach to the climate emergency?
This exhibition brings together works that explore human relationships with water through mythology, spirituality, folk traditions, and lived experiences from around the world.
With works by: Al-Istakhri, Jumana Emil Abboud, Martha Atienza, Raven Chacon, Cian Dayrit, Léuli Eshrāghi, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Abul Hisham, Candice Hopkins, Sohrab Hura, Hussein Nassereddine, Thảo Nguyên-Phan, Daniel Otero Torres, Karan Shrestha, Fatima Uzdenova, Munem Wasif.
For more information and photos, please visit the link.
Preview the exhibition on September 21, 2022, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Library Circles: Rashed Qurwash
14 September 2022 to 13 February 2023
Jameel Library
Library Circles is a series of research, talks, and experimental interventions by UAE practitioners in the Jameel Library and Jameel Arts Centre. The program explores alternative research methodologies to urge “thinking in public.”
For the Library’s Fall Circles, Jameel Library presents a research display by artist Rashed Qurwash.
Qurwash investigates the Jaddaf neighborhood in Dubai and the practices it had once held through images, documents, and interviews conducted with people who have occupied the area in various capacities. In addition to individual stories, Rashed investigates Jaddaf’s urban planning prior to the development within the local area in the first decade of the 21st century.
This fall, the Library Circles also feature two public programs to be announced later.
Rashed Qurwash (b.1990, Dubai, UAE) lives and works between Dubai and Los Angeles. Qurwash’s practice joins cinema, set design, and sculpture to explore themes of collective identities shaped through traditions, rituals, religion, and trade. His practice relies on subtextual content to mirror collective identities, heavily coded existences imposed on life and their functionalities within society.
Rashed is a recipient of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (2018) and the Cultural Foundation Art Residency in Abu Dhabi (2022).
Jameel Library Commissions: Khalid Mezaina
15 July 2022
Online – Jameel Library
The digital commission of the Jameel Library has presented a study of regional textiles and talismanic practices in the regions of Southwest Asia and North Africa, which includes entries released every fortnight starting from July 2022 on the Jameel Arts Centre website.
Khalid explores themes and techniques on surface design, ceremonial textiles, costumes for the stage, and the magical world of talismans, and his commission is two-fold: writings and a physical textile piece that unfolds throughout the duration of the commission.
This project expands on the textile and talismanic folk practices to create new connections between traditional craft practices, contemporary textiles, and the library’s collection.
Khalid Mezaina is an illustrator and textile artist from Dubai. Along with a BS in Visual Communication from the American University of Sharjah in 2006, Khalid graduated in 2018 from the Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA in Textiles. His commissioned and self-initiated projects range from art prints, installations, and murals, to designs for apparel, stationery, and publications.
Khalid has participated in projects and art residencies in the UAE and abroad. He has also been featured in regional and international exhibitions including, ‘Emirati Expressions IV: Conventions of Art’ (2015); ‘Portrait of a Nation’ (Abu Dhabi Festival, 2016 and Berlin Art Week, 2017); and ‘From Barcelona to Abu Dhabi: Works from the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) in dialogue with the Emirates Art’ (2018).
World Weather Network
21 June 2022 to 21 June 2023
Art Jameel is one of 29 arts organizations from around the world forming the World Weather Network, a global weather reporting project running from June 2022 to June 2023. That connects the voices of artists, writers, scientists, and environmentalists from around the world to reflect on climate change and its relationship to weather in a variety of contexts.
Art Jameel’s weather station explores atmospheric humidity, a central climatic marker of the Arabian Gulf; its reports primarily take the form of narrative podcast episodes by artists and writers that explore the concept of humidity through three themes: The Threshold, Sweat and Labour, and Technofutures.
For more information and for weather and podcast related projects, please visit jameelartscentre.org
Exhibitions:
“Proposals for a Memorial to Partition”
June 2022 to February 19, 2023
“Proposals for a Memorial to Partition” brings together proposals by artists and writers for an imagined memorial to the partition of India and Pakistan in the wake of British colonial rule. Curated by Murtaza Vali, these proposals range from artworks and texts to sketches, presenting a multitude of poetic and speculative approaches to a historical event that resists narrow categorizations.
For more information and photos, please visit the link
Weathering steel
792.1×792.1×475 cm
Art Jameel collection.
Conrad Shawcross’s practice involved many experiments in the fields of geometries and topologies; these constructions are conceived through sometimes modular, sometimes mechanical foundations, which could be theoretically extended infinitely into space.
Formation III: The Dappled Light of the Sun (2015), revolves around the natural patterns of geometry: from a simple, mathematical form, Shawcross has created an immersive work that stands on three tripods, six meters high. The geometric structures give an impression of being organic, comprised of branching, cloud-like forms made up of thousands of tetrahedrons, creating a canopy over part of Jaddaf Waterfront Sculpture Park.
About the Artist
Conrad Shawcross, who was born in 1971, lives in London, UK, and has a BA in Fine Arts from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and an MFA from Slade School of Art, London. Imbued with an appearance of scientific rationality, Conrad Shawcross’ sculptures explore subjects that lie on the borders of geometry and philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. Inspired by different technologies, the artist’s structures may retain in appearance the authority of machines – yet, they remain enigmatic, filled with paradox and wonder. Some have an absurdist melancholy feel, while others tend to the sublime, substituting the purely functional for the phenomenological experience.
Art Jameel Shop
Art Jameel shop offers a selection of gifts, children’s books, ceramics, handmade incense burners, Eidiyahs “gifts” envelopes, and inspiring and innovative cookbooks that are sure to add a different flavor to Iftar and Suhoor tables. All these products are available at our flagship store at Jameel Arts Centre and online, with worldwide delivery.
The Art Jameel Shop is home to all that is current in contemporary art, design, architecture, and culture. Shop here. Support art everywhere.
To browse the full range of offers, visit the Art Jameel online shop here.
Teible
Jameel Arts Centre, Ground Floor
Bakery: 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. Breakfast: 8 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Bistronomie menu: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. – 11:30 p.m. Closed on Tuesdays
The newly opened Teible in Jameel Arts Centre, based on local and seasonal sources, offers new dishes served throughout the holy month as part of the à la carte menu throughout the day.
Inspired by regional cuisine classics, dishes revisit traditional cuisine with a contemporary twist, including traditional Quzi, delicious Mtabbal, exquisite desserts made from a variety of local dates, and fresh milk ice cream to satisfy your love of desserts.
Source: Jameel Center