The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery’s “Khaleej Modern: Pioneers and Collectives in the Arabian Peninsula” exhibition was no modest endeavor. The first institutional attempt to tell a visual story of the Arabian Peninsula, which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, required tenacious archival research, imagination that went beyond the norm, and love for these artists, many of whom are now deceased and unable to see the results of their labor.
The show includes some 60 works beginning in the 1940s and spanning painting, sculpture, and installation, as well as more idiosyncratic entries, like a stunning visual diary. Some of the oldest works were loaned out of private collections and are being exhibited for the first time.
“In the early 20th century, this region didn’t have commercial galleries or formal exhibition spaces,” said Maya Allison, the gallery’s executive director and chief curator. “Artists had to teach themselves or go abroad and return to teach others what they’ve learned. This is a movement that didn’t have an institutional framework to tell its history even as it was happening.”
The show explores a variety of topics, including the search for these works, the development of an environment in which art can be produced and studied, and, most importantly, the reasons why countries are formed and how people interpret this process.
The exhibition, which was organized into four thematic groups by curator Aisha Stoby with help from Tala Nassar, is titled “Early Pioneers,” “Landscapes,” “Self-Representation and Portraiture,” and “Conceptual Turn.” One of the earliest known visual artists in the exhibition, painter Mojib Al Dosari, begins “Early Pioneers” with a smooth, regal portrait. He was a teenager when Kuwait’s oil reserves were discovered in 1922, sparking the country’s industrial revolution.
The curators informally founded the regional modern art movement when artists, coping with the rapid upheaval, began assembling in Kuwait, a small country at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
The folklore works from this era are concerned with preserving the character of a people and a location. Cafe scenes, religious rituals, farmers harvesting, and fishermen sailing toward a crimson horizon are all brought to life by vivid colors and large brushstrokes. The influential “Manama” Group was founded by Bahraini artist Nasser Al Yousif, Ahmed Qassim Al Sunni, and Abdul Karim Al-Orrayed. Named after his hometown of Manama, the group painted lush landscapes in which villagers stop what they are doing to look at the viewer, more out of curiosity than malice.
Though this is gradually improving, Arab art is underrepresented in the histories of modern art. To help fill in the gaps, Allison said that “Khaleej Modern” was “laying down the gauntlet” to scholars and curators around the globe. The research done for this exhibition by Stoby, who organized the first Omani pavilion at the current Venice Biennale, is impressive.
The “Picasso Manqué syndrome,” is a phenomenon in which Picasso was praised for appropriating African imagery. At the same time, artists below the Global North have been called derivative for engaging with influences outside their culture, which the curators are particular about and reject. Partha Mitter, a writer and historian, coined the phrase. The alternative is a variety of modernisms, each of which is unique due to its environment.
The term “transmodernism” has been coined to describe this concept, which is getting institutional support. Most recently, it was discussed in a survey of international surrealism held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale followed the disparate outbursts of surrealist fervor in about 45 nations, including the Arab world. They made the case that local histories rupture generalizations in art history. For instance, surrealism rebelled against the “system,” but that phrase has quite different connotations for European and post-colonial artists.
Hassan Meer, a significant Omani artist and co-founder of Muscat’s Stal Gallery and Studio as well as the Circle, contributes the last piece. With a looping installation showing the artist battling in a pool, Under the Water (2004) lights up a little gloomy space.
This year’s Venice Biennale was also visited by this frightening yet captivating vision. Ghosts are a theme in some of Meer’s work. The current environment, lingo, and values bear evidence of who he was and what Oman was. He asserts that this reality is neither inherently good nor bad. Time merely carries its prisoners into the unknown like rip currents.