“Why look Westwards when you can look East?”
It’s a question Sophie Arni asked herself many years ago.
A student of art history at the New York University Abu Dhabi in 2016, she observed how the local art community seemed to rely, as she describes it, on “western modes of thinking”.
“I always heard the tagline ‘East meets West’ when people talk about the UAE art scene, especially at the time,” she says.
Since then, Arni, a curator who is half-Swiss, half-Japanese, has been trying to redirect the focus towards East Asia and to form conceptual connections between the Arabian Gulf and Japan, where she currently lives.
This month, she opened East-East Vol. 4: The Curio Shop, a new exhibition in Tokyo that yokes the UAE and Japan through the works of contemporary artists. Moving across three different neighbourhoods in Tokyo throughout July, the show features 14 artists, eight from the Gulf, all of whom are premiering their work in the country, and six from Japan.
Among those in the show are UAE artists Almaha Jaralla, Arthur de Oliveira, Hashel Al Lamki and Khalid Mezaina, along with Japanese artists Daisak, Heijiro Yagi, Rintaro Fuse and Tomoki Kurokawa.
It is the latest in the exhibition series East-East: UAE Meets Japan that Arni developed in 2016 as a university student. At the time, she was completing her research on Chinese porcelain and its migration along the Silk Road towards Europe, but she also became interested in the trade routes across the Middle East and East Asia.
“The historical connections between the two regions are there, with the Silk Road and the trade that happened over centuries, but in the contemporary art scene, it’s always mediated by western institutions,” she says.
Arni wanted to bridge the two countries with her knowledge of emerging artists from both worlds. The first show commissioned works from four Emirati artists who turned to artistic techniques from Japan, including woodcut prints and the aesthetics of wabi-sabi.
East-East gained traction, with the initial show in Abu Dhabi restaged a month later at Chi-Ka, a clothing brand and temporary art space in Dubai. In 2017, it returned with East-East Vol. 3: 2020, comparing the concept of futurism in the Gulf and Japan.
Now, after a four-year hiatus, Arni debuts East-East in Japan with a curatorial theme inspired by Felice Beato’s 1868 photograph of a curio shop in Yokohama. Referring to bric-a-brac, “curios” – short for curiosity – were originally used for objects of interest from the Far East that were brought to Europe.
In the show, today’s curios crossing the Asian continent include manga and anime, an export from Japan that became popular in the Gulf in the 1990s to 2000s via shows dubbed in Arabic.
Aisha Al Ali’s works of milk cartons and juice boxes painted with faces of anime characters, including the robot cat Doraemon, suggest that the visual language of Gulf nostalgia is inevitably linked to this media.
“Though the kawaii aesthetic is dated in Japan, it’s still relevant outside of it, like in the UAE. It’s interesting to see how familiar anime is to people who grew up in the UAE, who see it as a kind of escape from the neoliberal aesthetic of super commercialisation in the 2000s,” Arni explains.
Salman AlNajem, on the other hand, creates endearing characters rendered in flat-style, with uniform faces of dotted eyes and curved smiles. His illustration One Million Aspiration borrows from the ukiyo-e style of 17th-century Japan that idealistically captured the scenes from the world.
AlNajem’s version focuses on a mother and daughter in traditional Emirati attire, but with interjections of consumerist life – a cup of coffee in the mother’s hand and a Hermes Birkin bag to the side.
But what about the UAE’s exports to Japan? Arni brings in Christopher Benton’s video work Dubai Jumeirah Gardens Villas & Estates Valley Hills to address the global image of Dubai and the UAE and its narrative of hyper-modernity.
The work stitches promo videos for doomed real estate projects throughout Dubai. Because they were never built, Benton states, they exist “in the liminal sphere of a utopian vision that never came”.
Arni explains that “the work deals with most of Japanese people’s impressions of the Gulf, buildings, money, oil, as an entry point,” proposing that the usual ideas of urbanism, gentrification and growth operate differently in the region.
Though influences from Japan are present in the works of some Gulf artists, artistic connections in the other direction are still thin.
“I think Japan has influenced youth culture [in the Gulf] more than the other way around,” Arni says.
“When it comes to the art scene, I think I am breaking new ground by introducing these young Gulf artists here. Many of the people who have come to see the show have said it’s the first they’ve seen artists from the region through an exhibition format,” the curator adds.
Beyond that, Arni is also attempting to mediate discourse between several artistic communities, tethering artists together not only by their inspiration or style, but also concepts and ideas.
“It’s been four years since the last [East-East], so this is a culmination of the conversation I have been having with artists here. I hope this exhibition can be a starting point for many artists to create more than that exchange.”
East-East Vol 4.: The Curio Shop is on view until Saturday, July 24. More information here.
Sri Lanka-India Test series schedule
- 1st Test India won by 304 runs at Galle
- 2nd Test Thursday-Monday at Colombo
- 3rd Test August 12-16 at Pallekele
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Hotel Silence
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
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Sheikh Zayed's poem
When it is unveiled at Abu Dhabi Art, the Standing Tall exhibition will appear as an interplay of poetry and art. The 100 scarves are 100 fragments surrounding five, figurative, female sculptures, and both sculptures and scarves are hand-embroidered by a group of refugee women artisans, who used the Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery art of tatreez. Fragments of Sheikh Zayed’s poem Your Love is Ruling My Heart, written in Arabic as a love poem to his nation, are embroidered onto both the sculptures and the scarves. Here is the English translation.
Your love is ruling over my heart
Your love is ruling over my heart, even a mountain can’t bear all of it
Woe for my heart of such a love, if it befell it and made it its home
You came on me like a gleaming sun, you are the cure for my soul of its sickness
Be lenient on me, oh tender one, and have mercy on who because of you is in ruins
You are like the Ajeed Al-reem [leader of the gazelle herd] for my country, the source of all of its knowledge
You waddle even when you stand still, with feet white like the blooming of the dates of the palm
Oh, who wishes to deprive me of sleep, the night has ended and I still have not seen you
You are the cure for my sickness and my support, you dried my throat up let me go and damp it
Help me, oh children of mine, for in his love my life will pass me by.
Company%20Profile
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Liverpool's all-time goalscorers
Ian Rush 346
Roger Hunt 285
Mohamed Salah 250
Gordon Hodgson 241
Billy Liddell 228
GIANT REVIEW
Starring: Amir El-Masry, Pierce Brosnan
Director: Athale
Rating: 4/5
A State of Passion
Directors: Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi
Stars: Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Rating: 4/5
Company profile
Company: Eighty6
Date started: October 2021
Founders: Abdul Kader Saadi and Anwar Nusseibeh
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Hospitality
Size: 25 employees
Funding stage: Pre-series A
Investment: $1 million
Investors: Seed funding, angel investors
MATCH INFO
Rugby World Cup (all times UAE)
Third-place play-off: New Zealand v Wales, Friday, 1pm
TEACHERS' PAY - WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Pay varies significantly depending on the school, its rating and the curriculum. Here's a rough guide as of January 2021:
- top end schools tend to pay Dh16,000-17,000 a month - plus a monthly housing allowance of up to Dh6,000. These tend to be British curriculum schools rated 'outstanding' or 'very good', followed by American schools
- average salary across curriculums and skill levels is about Dh10,000, recruiters say
- it is becoming more common for schools to provide accommodation, sometimes in an apartment block with other teachers, rather than hand teachers a cash housing allowance
- some strong performing schools have cut back on salaries since the pandemic began, sometimes offering Dh16,000 including the housing allowance, which reflects the slump in rental costs, and sheer demand for jobs
- maths and science teachers are most in demand and some schools will pay up to Dh3,000 more than other teachers in recognition of their technical skills
- at the other end of the market, teachers in some Indian schools, where fees are lower and competition among applicants is intense, can be paid as low as Dh3,000 per month
- in Indian schools, it has also become common for teachers to share residential accommodation, living in a block with colleagues
MATCH INFO
Quarter-finals
Saturday (all times UAE)
England v Australia, 11.15am
New Zealand v Ireland, 2.15pm
Sunday
Wales v France, 11.15am
Japan v South Africa, 2.15pm
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Director: Jon Favreau
Starring: Donald Glover, Seth Rogen, John Oliver
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Shantanu Maheshwari, Jimmy Shergill, Saiee Manjrekar
Director: Neeraj Pandey
Rating: 2.5/5
SPECS%3A%20Polestar%203
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RESULT
Huddersfield Town 2 Manchester United 1
Huddersfield: Mooy (28'), Depoitre (33')
Manchester United: Rashford (78')
Man of the Match: Aaron Mooy (Huddersfield Town)
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Director: Scott Cooper
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Odessa Young, Jeremy Strong
Rating: 4/5
Sreesanth's India bowling career
Tests 27, Wickets 87, Average 37.59, Best 5-40
ODIs 53, Wickets 75, Average 33.44, Best 6-55
T20Is 10, Wickets 7, Average 41.14, Best 2-12
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MATCH INFO
Newcastle United 3
Gayle (23'), Perez (59', 63')
Chelsea 0
General%20Classification
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The biog
Favourite films: Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia
Favourite books: Start with Why by Simon Sinek and Good to be Great by Jim Collins
Favourite dish: Grilled fish
Inspiration: Sheikh Zayed's visionary leadership taught me to embrace new challenges.
Hydrogen: Market potential
Hydrogen has an estimated $11 trillion market potential, according to Bank of America Securities and is expected to generate $2.5tn in direct revenues and $11tn of indirect infrastructure by 2050 as its production increases six-fold.
"We believe we are reaching the point of harnessing the element that comprises 90 per cent of the universe, effectively and economically,” the bank said in a recent report.
Falling costs of renewable energy and electrolysers used in green hydrogen production is one of the main catalysts for the increasingly bullish sentiment over the element.
The cost of electrolysers used in green hydrogen production has halved over the last five years and will fall to 60 to 90 per cent by the end of the decade, acceding to Haim Israel, equity strategist at Merrill Lynch. A global focus on decarbonisation and sustainability is also a big driver in its development.
Skoda Superb Specs
Engine: 2-litre TSI petrol
Power: 190hp
Torque: 320Nm
Price: From Dh147,000
Available: Now
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
