The rainstorm of April 2024 was dire for The Third Line. Water poured into the art gallery in Alserkal Avenue, flooding its offices and seeping into its storage space. The gallery’s entire collection had to be taken out and assessed. Several artworks were damaged and had to be restored.
The Third Line was not the only space affected by the storm. Several areas in Dubai were submerged by the unprecedented rains and the emirate has, since then, taken active measures to thwart similar widespread flooding. The episode also pushed The Third Line, too, to consider how they managed their collection.
“For the first time, they electronically logged everything,” curator Shumon Basar says. “They hadn't done it before. They reorganised [the collection] so it's searchable in a way. It wasn't before.”
Looking through the log, Basar says he felt like he was “standing in one of the great museums of art of the region. “But no one sees it,” he says. “It's like it is invisible and I want to make it visible.”
Basar finally had that chance when the gallery asked him to curate their anniversary show. At the centre of Dubai’s contemporary art landscape for two decades, The Third Line’s story is inextricable from the city’s own. In turn, Dubai’s development can’t be effectively examined without taking into account the global transformations of the past 20 years.
These concentric relationships inform The Only Way Out is Through: The Twentieth Line. Running until November 9, the exhibition brings together works by every artist who has been associated with the gallery.
Hayv Kahraman’s enigmatic figures, Farah Al Qasimi’s observant eye and the documentarian sensibilities of Tarek Al-Ghoussein are all represented here, as are Huda Lutfi’s wit, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s archival inquiries, and Hassan Hajjaj’s photographs that verge on the sculptural through their exuberant frames.
Rather than haphazardly assembling this myriad collection together in the space, Basar has taken a thoughtful, chronological approach, arranging the works with floor-printed timestamps that spring from hyper-individual and city-related contexts to transformative global moments.
The curation, as such, feels multidimensional – like stepping into a memory-stirring tesseract that folds and unfolds through time and space. This is particularly true for the UAE’s long-time residents, who will remember several of the key moments mentioned in the exhibition – including the launch of the Sharjah Biennial in 1993, the opening of Burj Khalifa in 2010 and the opening of Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2017. All of those moments were sharply symbolic in the way various emirates positioned themselves globally.
The exhibition begins by presenting Dubai at the turn of the century. Photographs by Fouad Elkoury and Al-Ghoussein juxtapose sandy stretches with billboards advertising The Palm, whereas a work by Hajjaj that shows the warehouses in Al Quoz from the same time period. The artworks are time-stamped with moments beginning with the November 2005 establishment of The Third Line by Sunny Rahbar, with the support of Claudia Cellini and Omar Ghobash. Basar’s first visit to Dubai in December 2005 is also listed.
“The reason I wanted to do this show is partly to honour and celebrate The Third Line, who are dear friends and allies, but it's also my 20th anniversary,” Basar says.
He adds that he took the opportunity to reflect just how much has changed in the city since then, as well as in its cultural sector. “I wanted us to time-travel back to that moment because 20 years here is like 80 years anywhere else,” he says, referencing the pace of change that has transformed Dubai.
“It's worth reminding people who perhaps weren't here then and have only got here recently that, at that time, for the leadership here, in terms of their Maslow hierarchy of needs, culture was not anywhere on that list.”
Priorities, instead, lay with projects such as the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall, which sought to put the city on the map in a commercial way. “Culture really didn’t fit in that vision,” Basar says. “Therefore, the responsibility lay on the entrepreneurial private sector. This was unique.”
The city’s first art institutions – such as The Third Line, Green Art Gallery, XVA Gallery and Tabari Artspace – set the foundation for its art sector. Most had to launch as commercial entities as there was no trade licence dedicated to art institutions.
“The Third Line was here to sell art, but it was really an ideological project,” Basar says, pointing out that the galleries sought to amplify artistic voices from the region at a time when it was particularly vital to do so. “This is post-9/11, post the US invasion of Iraq,” he says. “At a time people who look ed like us, with our names and our religion were seen as the spectral enemy.”
Arriving to Dubai from London in 2005, Basar was well acquainted with the antagonistic narratives emerging in the West. Here, however, he found a different, more uplifting reality.
“It was a kind of fever dream of futurism, and I found it extremely inspiring,” Basar says. “Because, for me, the West was already in the death throes of its decline. I felt that towards the end of the 20th century and then I came here and thought: ‘Woah, this is the new cognitive centre of the world.’ And it’s interesting that the cultural cultivation fell upon commercial, entrepreneurial actors.”
After a series of impressive works, including Lamya Gargash’s Majlis series, as well as Shirin Aliabadi’s Girls in Car 4, arrived an important moment in Dubai’s art sector: the March 2007 opening of the DIFC Gulf Art Fair, which would later be renamed Art Dubai. The moment is temporally reflected by Youssef Nabil’s 2007 work I Pray, Self-Portrait, New York and Kahraman’s 2008 oil-on-linen piece Tomato.
Basar has played a pivotal role in Art Dubai, specifically in shaping its Global Art Forum. “After this, I will prepare for the 20th anniversary of Global Art Forum. That's 20 years of Art Dubai next year,” he says. The event, he notes, is a perfect example of how an initiative that seems commercially-inclined can have significant cultural impact.
“It is an art fair,” he says. “The forum is a talks programme, but the contribution we end up making is way more.”
Cultural events and initiatives like Art Dubai and the general bustle of the sector today are, in many ways, the culmination of efforts by the city’s first art institutions, Basar suggests.
“Commercial entities or protagonists, such as The Third Line, would look at the landscape and see what’s missing. Claudia would say the audience was missing so they had reading clubs, film screenings, all of the things you would get at an artist’s space, they did that. They didn’t make money but they knew they had to do it.”
The Only Way Out is Through references several important moments in UAE history, but it also gestures towards global events, bringing to mind their local impact.
The episodes range from pop-cultural to political. They include the release of the first iPhone in 2007, the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank and the 2008 financial crisis, the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle, the first case of the new coronavirus in 2019, the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion and the public release of ChatGPT in 2022. The timestamps heighten the context of the artworks, turning them into touchstones of history. Moments from recent Palestinian history are also mentioned, including Israel’s attacks on Gaza in July 2014 and the start of the war in October 2023.
“It would be completely morally remiss of me to pretend I’m telling the story of the last 20 years or so and of the present moment if I don’t address that,” Basar says.
As such, while The Only Way Out is Through: The Twentieth Line is not a comprehensive survey of the past 20 years – would that even be possible? – it does offer an interesting vantage point of reflection, both of the momentous changes that have transformed The Third Line, the emirate, the region and the globe, as well as the resilience – personal and collective – that has weathered through the tumult and grief.
That is, after all, where the title of the exhibition stems from. “I lost my father in December, after an 18-month stretch of his decline,” Basar says. “To go through that while the genocide was going on, that became my reality.
“I went through personal grief, but then there’s meta grief, where I spend half the day trying not to cry while watching the news. That is really what drives the title. When it comes to grief, there are no shortcuts. You plough through day by day.”
The Only Way Out is Through: The Twentieth Line runs until November 9
