Three words title this year’s Art Here exhibition at Louvre Abu Dhabi, proposing what guest curator Simon Njami calls “a riddle”. Each word is in a different language. They do not directly translate from one another, and yet the exhibition’s theme resonates somewhere in between them.
The annual contemporary art exhibition, which features the artworks shortlisted for the Richard Mille Art Prize and is running until December 15, is titled ouvertures (French for openings), awakenings and afaq (Arabic for horizon). The triptych theme, Njami says, has sharp connotations with Abu Dhabi and the Saadiyat Cultural District and how the emirate is positioning itself as a cultural hub, opening up to the world.
“I think that what I have composed is a riddle,” Njami says. “At times one word cannot say everything. I took the opportunity of the translation to enhance the different meanings. I think everything was contained in the opening, which is ouverture in French, and it’s a musical term, the first movement of a concerto or symphony. It is announcing something.”
For Njami, opening is not a solidified moment, but a process that leads to a heightened state of awareness, and that awakening seeks direction, striding towards the horizon.
“An artist is always looking for a horizon, a goal, an aim,” he says. “When you start with the opening or the awakening, it is to go somewhere.”
Besides being the exhibition’s curator, Njami is also on the jury of the Richard Mille Art Prize. He is joined by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan, adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and chairman of UAE Unlimited; poet and filmmaker Nujoom Alghanem; Maya Allison, founding executive director and chief curator of the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Galleries; and Guilhem Andre, Louvre Abu Dhabi’s scientific curatorial and collection management director.
With 200 applications for this year’s Richard Mille Art Prize, Njami says he scrutinised how well the proposals reflected his definition of contemporaneity. "It means something that is speaking about subject matters that are here and now, and with [contemporary] techniques," he says. "It could embroidering, it’s about how people use it. It's about the technology. It's about the spiritual. It’s about politics.”
Njami says he was also conscious of selecting works that he envisioned with be in dialogue with the physicality of Louvre Abu Dhabi. A story needed to materialise as visitors moved from one place to another, a narrative thread that was felt on an intrinsic level. “What I’m always telling young curators and scenographers is that your exhibition will be a success if people don’t see the strings, but feel it as if it is natural.”
Njami has succeeded in practising this himself. Art Here 2024 opens at the indoor forum area of Louvre Abu Dhabi. Five screens hang above the space, showing vast desert scenes shot in Tunisia. The artwork, Landscapes by Tunisian artist Nicene Kossentini, presents the human traces in these desert scenes. In one, plastic waste is entwined in desert shrubs. In another, a home made of palm fronds stands abandoned. A third shows a fishing boat is barely evident in the waters beyond the flat sands. As time progresses, these scenes become coated by a layer of wax that dries to an opaque texture before the feed cuts to black.
Landscapes could be seen as a poetic take on the passivity with which we observe global catastrophes, from climate change to war. “We are seeing the landscape, and suddenly it's disappearing,” Kossentini says.
From here on, the exhibition moves outside to the octagonal Damascene fountain, which is a highlight of Louvre Abu Dhabi's collection. A two-meter-high beach ball stands beside the 18th-century element. The sculpture, Debutante Ball by Emirati artist Lamya Gargash, is created using 3D-printed techniques and entirely with sand sourced from the UAE.
“I wanted to work with something close to home,” Gargash says. The work, she says, emanates from a childhood memory, where a person asked her where she was from, and upon responding, was told that the UAE was “just a big sandbox".
“I was young, so I took it to heart, but I did not know how to vocalise or defend myself,” she says. “But it has always stayed with me. The concept of awakening felt very fitting to the kind of journey that I was going through, through the journey of self-awakening, finding yourself and being rooted in who you are. So I thought, let me revisit that comment, turn a provocative negative statement into something positive.”
Sand echoes in the subsequent work as well. In Tilling the Soil, Franco-Tunisian artist Ferielle Doulain-Zouari has arranged a tessellation of hand-moulded clay bricks. Crushed blue glass runs across the tessellation with sand, moving as a straight line before curving at the midpoint. Half of the 250 bricks presented were made in Tunisia using traditional methods, the others were made in the UAE.
In fact, the design of the bricks – bearing prints and traces of the clay being kneaded by hand – was inspired by an archaeological site in Abu Dhabi. “I found a really beautiful picture of old mud bricks that were made in the Iron Age, and when people were building houses, they were leaving some prints with their fingers on the mud," she says. "For me, it was really beautiful, because it was like the trace of the individual person to do something that is collective.”
The process of learning these traditional techniques, Doulain-Zouari says, was an awakening in itself, as it pushed her towards unanticipated encounters. “Because of this project, I found myself in some places that are so unexpected,” she says. “I formed relationships, and learned from the other people.”
For Brides of the Sky, Egyptian artist Moataz Nasr drew inspiration from a tale about a group of women in a Syrian fort who withstood a Mongol invasion in the 12th century. They did so by disguising themselves as men and standing at the ramparts. Nasr came across the story as he tried to find how the designs of ramparts across the Middle East flourished over time, developing from angular blocks to floral designs that were sometimes referred to as brides of the sky.
He came across several stories that mythologised the designs, but the tale of the women standing up to the Mongols captivated him the most. Using the story as a springboard, he refashioned a traditional rampart design as two steel structures. The design abstractly recalls a human-shaped figure, reaching up towards the sky.
This beckoning of the sky and air sustains the final work of the exhibition. Shared Motion by Sarah Almehairi is a sculptural audio-visual installation that renders the word "wind" across four languages: English, Urdu, Farsi and Hindi.
The four iterations of the word are materialised in an arrangement of LED lights and steel, presented as overlapping soundwaves on a pool of water. The soundwaves light up as the installation’s audio component voices each iteration of the word, until they start to overlap.
“I was looking at the linguistic landscape of the countries surrounding the Arabian Sea, specifically through the lens of maritime trade,” Almehairi says. “That is why it's placed within the water, to bring that element in.”
Art Here is on display at Louvre Abu Dhabi until December 15
