Almost 40 years since he first came to the UAE, the Bulgarian artist Christo has returned to Abu Dhabi to transmit some of the wisdom learnt since then to a new generation of students.
Following a public event hosted by New York University Abu Dhabi at the Intercontinental, and a closed lecture at the Higher College of Technology earlier this week, Christo will speak at Zayed University today. In addition to outlining an artistic practice, he is in town to explain a project in the UAE he's been seeking to realise since the 1970s.
Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude were a true artistic partnership. Devoted to each other and to their art, even taking separate planes so that in the event of disaster the surviving spouse could continue their work, they enacted some of the world's most poetic and powerful public art pieces.
Before Jeanne-Claude died in 2009, their works were "gentle disturbances", as Christo refers to them, into the normality of cities and landscapes. They famously wrapped the Reichstag, Berlin's political headquarters, in 100,000 square metres of fabric. They placed 7,503 orange fabric gates in Central Park during a bleak New York winter in 2005, and swathed an entire section of Australian coastline in erosion-control mesh.
But Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived into a young, independent UAE in 1979 at the invitation of the French ambassador to the country at that time. They had an idea for a sculpture near Liwa Oasis that would see 410,000 empty oil barrels arranged into the shape of a 350 metre tall sculpture, The Mastaba, which Christo says was inspired by the mud bench with a flat top and slanted walls, once found moulded into the fronts of houses across the Arab world.
"The cylindrical ends of all these barrels are painted in an incredible variety of colours," the artist explains. "From far away, The Mastaba would appear like a huge abstract painting, or a mosaic."
The artists made several trips after 1979, the most recent being in 2007, to investigate how best to navigate permission protocol for this project. So far, The Mastaba exists only in sketches and scale models.
But patience is the hallmark of their practice. "In the past 50 years, we've realised 22 projects and failed to get permission for 37 more," says Christo, having received news last week that a project to suspend silvery, luminous panels over 62 kilometres of the Arkansas River in 2014 has finally received approval from the US Department of the Interior. "We're probably the only artists in the world that make people think before a work exists."
They waited more than 30 years for permission to wrap the Reichstag. The Gates, in Central Park, only came to fruition with the arrival of Michael Bloomberg as mayor. It's all, he says, a matter of "circumstance and luck" as to whether a work comes into being.
The artists have never accepted funds and grants to make any public piece happen. Through a savvy business model, the preparatory sketches and lithographs that outline a forthcoming project, done by Christo's own hand, are exhibited and sold via curators internationally. All of the money from this goes into their public artworks. "I will not lose one millimetre of my freedom to do the thing that I do," says Christo. "This is why we try to have resources of money - so as not to sacrifice the aesthetics of our projects."
This discipline, he says, came from escaping Bulgaria's encroaching communism in the 1950s. "I will not do any piece of art that has a purpose. I want to create pure poetry and not propaganda. I left a communist country to have that irrational freedom of the artist."
Christo, it would seem, is not in town looking for money for The Mastaba. Instead, he's here to introduce himself and a vision of public art to a country much-changed since 1979.
"The next stage for this project? Nobody knows. We are open to a lot of suggestions and we don't know what we'll discover over the next few weeks or months.
"It's all about the chance of circumstance. But we consider each project like an expedition with its tensions, angst, joy, certainties and uncertainties."
Now 76, Christo notes that navigating such expeditions has become even more difficult alone. "At every stage of a project, we're always thinking, 'What would Jeanne-Claude say?'"
The White Lotus: Season three
Creator: Mike White
Starring: Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Natasha Rothwell
Rating: 4.5/5
Drishyam 2
Directed by: Jeethu Joseph
Starring: Mohanlal, Meena, Ansiba, Murali Gopy
Rating: 4 stars
The National Archives, Abu Dhabi
Founded over 50 years ago, the National Archives collects valuable historical material relating to the UAE, and is the oldest and richest archive relating to the Arabian Gulf.
Much of the material can be viewed on line at the Arabian Gulf Digital Archive - https://www.agda.ae/en
Scores
Rajasthan Royals 160-8 (20 ov)
Kolkata Knight Riders 163-3 (18.5 ov)
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
THE SPECS
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THE SPECS
Engine: 6.75-litre twin-turbocharged V12 petrol engine
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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
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
Election pledges on migration
CDU: "Now is the time to control the German borders and enforce strict border rejections"
SPD: "Border closures and blanket rejections at internal borders contradict the spirit of a common area of freedom"
Profile of MoneyFellows
Founder: Ahmed Wadi
Launched: 2016
Employees: 76
Financing stage: Series A ($4 million)
Investors: Partech, Sawari Ventures, 500 Startups, Dubai Angel Investors, Phoenician Fund
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
Test
Director: S Sashikanth
Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
Star rating: 2/5
