DUBAI has discovered there really are some things money can’t buy. After a decade of petrodollar-driven success that has established it rapidly as a regional financial, trade, tourism and retail center, the emirate has hit a speed bump in an unexpected arena — art.
Burgeoning enthusiasm for collecting art convinced many that Dubai was about to become an overnight sensation in the international market, putting a gloss of sophistication on the cultural life of the emirate.
But becoming a true global art center, one that would potentially alter the cultural fabric of the entire Middle East, is a bit more complicated — and time-consuming.
“There are many wealthy people in Dubai and certainly there is a rise in the disposable income, but that doesn’t suddenly make Dubai the hub of the regional art market,” said Matthew Girling, chief executive for UK and Europe at Bonhams, one of the world’s biggest fine art auction houses.
“There is a network of people around you in places like London or New York — museums, galleries, dealers. This is what helps you weather a downturn. All that is very much in its infancy in Dubai,” Girling said.
Such a wide and deep network can only emerge over time, experts said, and no amount of wealth can rush the maturing process.
Words like "booming" and "blossoming" were used to describe Dubai’s nascent contemporary art market five years ago as auctions racked up one record-setting sale after the other. But then the global financial crisis hit in 2008, and the revenues of both Christie’s and Bonhams took sharp dives, eventually prompting Bonhams to halt auctions in the city.
“It was a false dawn, if you like to call it that,” Girling recalled.
Christie’s, which continues to have a presence in Dubai, held its 12th auction in April but revenues are nowhere near the $20 million seen in 2008. The highest since then for a regular auction was $7.9 million in April last year.
For Bonhams, shrinking revenues paved the way for an exit.
“I realized if we stayed in Dubai we’d be hit more than we would in London,” said Girling, who took the decision to shrink operations to a liaison office last year. “We’ve got clients all around the world and a lot of them travel. You don’t necessarily have to put the auction in Dubai to reach out to them.”
What is exciting to art experts is the steady growth in numbers and influence of collectors from the Middle East, and the increasing participation of younger buyers.
Figures show that Middle Eastern collectors are increasingly becoming more influential players in the global art market, no matter where they are based, however.
Middle Eastern clients accounted for 8 percent of Christie’s global auction turnover in 2011, the auction house said, up from 5 percent in 2010. “Half the time I’m here and half the time I’m in London,” one Middle Eastern art collector who takes part in Christie’s auctions told Reuters in Dubai.
“But I see more and more young people here, starting with more affordable pieces, educating themselves and trying to be a part of this thing,” he said.
“I do find it exciting.”
A Christie’s auction in April in the ballroom of Jumeriah Emirates Towers in downtown Dubai featured works by contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists and attracted a young, fashionable crowd, some of them emerging collectors.
Michael Jeha, Christie’s Middle East director, who describes the boom in 2007 and early 2008 as overheating and unsustainable, said this new league of collectors was instrumental to the foundation of a stronger market.
“Where we are today is you have a truly sustainable market with a far deeper base of buyers and far more younger collectors participating,” he said. “Collectors want to buy art from their own region as they relate to it.” The status of women in society, social and civil rights and certainly the effects of the Arab Spring revolutions in several countries in the Middle East are what stimulates this younger art crowd. Some say they’re looking for pieces that, as collector Shaz Sheibani put it, “reflect the pains of the society and are full of powerful statements.”
“Iranian art for example is very topical,” said Sheibani, a Canadian national of Iranian origin who grew up in Dubai. “I like those kinds of things that I can relate to and the messages are more about the reflections on the society.”
Sheibani, 34, who has been collecting art for the past four to five years, talks about a generation of people who spent their childhood in Dubai and then went abroad to study. Many came back with a fresh and broad world vision and are determined to be a part of the artistic transformation of the city.
“What happens when your walls are full?” asked Bashar Al-Shrooqi, a private collector and the director of Dubai’s Cuadro Fine Art Gallery. “Then you actually develop this passion and instead of going to the movies you go to a gallery opening and at that point it becomes not just collecting to fill your walls anymore ... This is what we’ve been seeing here.”
One positive indicator for the Dubai art scene is the popularity of Art Dubai, which covers the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia region. For its sixth edition this year, featuring 75 galleries from 32 countries, visitor numbers have nearly quadrupled from its first year in 2007 to more than 22,000.
Fair director Antonia Carver predicted a bright future for Dubai’s art market.
“The recognition of Arab and Iranian artists by the global market has been absolutely phenomenal,” she said.
“I don’t think anyone in the art market here is hoping for a big boom. They’re hoping for a steady growth and I can say we’re in a much better position than before.”
Art market takes a dive in Dubai
Art market takes a dive in Dubai
Lina Gazzaz traces growth, memory and resilience at Art Basel Qatar
- The Saudi artist presents ‘Tracing Lines of Growth’ at the fair’s inaugural edition
DUBAI: Saudi artist Lina Gazzaz will present a major solo exhibition via Hafez Gallery at the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, which runs Feb. 3 to 7. “Tracing Lines of Growth” is a body of work that transmutes botanical fragments into meditations on resilience, memory and becoming.
Hafez Gallery, which was founded in Jeddah, frames the show as part of its mission to elevate underrepresented regional practices within global conversations. Gazzaz’s biography reinforces that reach. Based in Jeddah and trained in the United States, she works across sculpture, installation, painting and video, and has exhibited in Saudi Arabia, the US, Lebanon, the UK, Germany, the UAEand Brazil. Her experimental practice bridges organic material and conceptual inquiry to probe ecological kinship, cultural memory and temporal rhythm.
“Tracing Lines of Growth” is a collection rooted in long-term inquiry. “I started to think about it in 2014,” Gazzaz told Arab News, describing a project that has evolved from her initial simple line drawings through research, experimentation and material interrogation.
What began as tracing the lines of Royal Palm crown shafts became an extended engagement with the palm’s physiology, its cultural significance and its symbolic afterlives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she went deeper into that exploration, translating weathered crown shafts into “lyrical instruments of time.”
Each fragment of “Tracing Lines of Growth” is treated as a cache of human and ecological narratives. Gazzaz describes a feeling of working with materials that “have witnessed civilization,”attributing to them a deep collective memory.
Hafez Gallery’s presentation text frames the palm as a cipher — its vascular routes once pulsing with sap transformed into calligraphic marks that summon the bodies of ouds, desert dunes and scripted traces rooted in Qur’anic and biblical lore.
“Today, the palm has evolved into a symbol of the land and its people. Throughout the Arabian Peninsula, it is still one of the few agricultural exports; and plays an integral role in the livelihood of agrarian communities,” said Gazzaz.
The sculptures’ rippling ribs and vaulted folds, stitched with red thread, evoke what the artist hears and sees in the wood. “Each individual line represents a story, and it’s narrating humanity’s story,” she said.
The works’ stitching is described in the gallery’s materials as “meticulous.” It emphasizes linear pathways and punctuates the sculptures with the “suggestion of life’s energy moving through the dormant material.”
“(I used) fine red thread — the color of life and energy — to narrate the longevity of growth, embodying themes of balance, fragility, music, transformation and movement. The collection is about the continuous existence in different forms and interaction; within the concept of time,” Gazzaz explained.
Hand-stitching, in Gazzaz’s practice, highlights her insistence on care and repair, and the human labor that converts cast-off organic forms into carriers of narratives.
Gazzaz describes her practice as a marriage between rigorous research and intuitive making. “I am a search-based artist... Sometimes I cannot stop searching,” she said. “During the search and finding more and more, and diving more and more, the subconscious starts to collaborate with you too, because of your intention. After all the research, I go with the flow. I don’t plan... I go with the flow, and I listen to it.”
The artist is far from done with this particular project. “I am now beginning to explore the piece with glass,” she noted.
Art Basel Qatar’s curatorial theme for its inaugural year is “Becoming.” For Gazzaz, ‘becoming’ is evident in the material and conceptual transformations she stages: discarded palm fragments reconstituted into scores of lived time, stitched lines reactivated as narratives.
“It’s about balance. It’s about fragility. It’s about resilience,” she said.
