Unwelcome and uncomfortable it may have been, but the 83 per cent humidity that saturated Sharjah on Saturday evening only served to highlight the issues that are explored in An Ecology, a new three-part installation by the 30-year-old Lebanese artist, Mahmoud Safadi.
Alongside new works by the UAE-based artists Al Anood Al Obaidly and Nasir Nasrallah and the Algerian artist Soufiane Zouggar, An Ecology is now on display at the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) as part of the March Project 2017.
An annual educational residency programme that is now in its fourth season, the March Project extends invitations to artists to come to Sharjah, explore the emirate and work on new projects alongside carefully-selected international mentors and members of the SAF team.
"It's a research process for us as well. It allows us to get to know a younger generation of artists who are working locally and in the region who we haven't worked with before," explains Sharjah Art Foundation's deputy director Reem Shadid, who also helps the March Project artists to realise their proposals by liaising with mentors and in selecting locations for the works.
"Every year it shifts a little bit but when we first conceived the project, we wanted to bring a group of artists together and to take them through a programme together that includes talks by professionals and technical workshops. One year it was about lighting, another it was about working with video," Shadid explains.
"We invite them in March to start their research; they are expected to submit a proposal in June; we discuss that and then we have the exhibition."
Housed in the Bait Hussain Makrani, one of the traditional buildings that cluster around the Sharjah Art Foundation gallery spaces in Al Mureijah Square, Safadi's installations examine life – both vegetable and human – as it is lived at the margins, and the blurring of boundaries between the natural and the man-made that occur in our urban environments.
"I grew up in cities and I remember that nature was always something that you went to, or you might go to the park, but with this work I am trying to look beyond that distinction," Safadi told me at the show's opening, which also took visitors on a walking tour of the various SAF spaces in Sharjah's Al Mureijah, Arts and Calligraphy Squares.
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Read more:
Art exhibitions in the UAE: what to see now the new season is here
Maha Maamoun's postcards from the real Cairo
Emerging UAE artists are unafraid to challenge in the latest SEAF show
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In Living byproduct those margins are both living and literal. Using plants collected from various sites around the city – car parks, waste ground, plots next to telephone boxes – Safadi has created a kind of crevice garden planted at the junction between the wall and the floor, in a small room whose only source of water is the condensate that drips from an air-conditioning unit, which was working overtime in the unexpected heat.
"The AC drips water depending on how many people are here, on the temperature, on the season, so it becomes an ecosystem, in a way. There's no more separation between nature and the urban environment," Safadi said.
"And if you walk around Sharjah, the green spaces that you see always occur where there is moisture, which happens because of our advancement, because of construction or happenstance– things that are the result of urban life," he added.
"But for this to happen, lots of things have to come together. There has to be a source of water and a seed has to fall in the right place."
Inspired in part by the month he spent in residency in the emirate in March but also by an existing installation in the Bait Hussain Makrani's courtyard, Lemos Auad's plant-based A Moment of the Sky / Four Humours – which was created for Sharjah Biennial 13 – Safadi's Of Flesh and Earth consists of a series of rough casts of the artist's hands that recreate gestures associated with gardening such as watering, digging and the sowing of seeds.
"I saw all of these people out tending parks and gardens at sunrise and sunset so I started thinking of that as a kind of invisible hand that takes care of all the greenspaces and public spaces," Safadi explained about the sculptures, which combine clay with another natural and locally-occurring material, gypsum, that is associated with construction. "It's a gesture we don't usually notice, not just here but in every city. We take our green spaces for granted and we don't see or think about the labour that goes into them but these things don't happen by themselves. There is a whole network of labour that goes into them and I wanted to make that gesture visible in some way."
If Safadi's work addresses some of the same themes as Vikram Divecha's Shaping Resistance (2015), which also sought to draw attention to the overlooked work of horticultural labourers, it also testifies to the contradictory fragility and tenacity of nature in the Emirates, urban or otherwise.
Safadi spent a significant amount of his March residency travelling around Sharjah with Soufiane Zouggar, a 35-year-old Algerian artist whose March Project 2017 installation, Temporary flesh walls' stories, permanent posters and one portrait, represents a kind of tribute to an altogether more human form of persistence – the life of a Pakistani, Izhar, who has lived in Sharjah for more than 40 years.
Now the caretaker of an abandoned Modernist cinema in Khorfakkan that has been saved for posterity thanks to the personal efforts of the Sharjah Art Foundation's president and director, Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, Izhar previously worked as the cinema's projectionist and in its box office. Prior to that he worked as a labourer on various construction projects.
In Zouggar's multimedia installation, which is housed in the SAF's Dar Al Nadwa, Calligraphy Square, Izhar has become a kind of spectral figure who is only seen once, in a reflection, but whose presence seems to have become a part of the building's fabric. This is recorded in a series of photographs and alluded to in foud large temporary moulds for concrete supports, supported by scaffolding, which, like Izhar, have travelled from job-to-job but whose emptiness conjures notions of itinerancy and absence, alienation and loss.
Although there are no direct links, both Zouggar and Safadi's work contain distant echoes of Ali Cherri's UAE-based works, especially the 2015 film The Digger, which also featured the djinn-like figure of a Pakistani caretaker, this time of Sharjah's archaeological sites, and Cherri's 2016 film Petrified, which explored the artfully-constructed naturalness of Sharjah's Arabian Wildlife Centre, one of the destinations Safadi visited when he explored the emirate earlier this year.
If the March Project encouraged Safadi to explore themes and materials outside his usual, film-based sphere of practise and Zouggar to move his investigation of materials and memory beyond his native Algeria, it has allowed the Abu Dhabi-based artist Al Anood Al Obaidly to operate at a scale that is far beyond her usual scope. Starting with collages constructed from discarded consumer materials such as plastic packaging, which she transforms into sculptures that explore composition, colour, tension and humour, the size of Al Obaidly's work is normally limited by the fact that she works from a studio in her home.
Thanks to the March Project, however, she has been able to produce Slightly Related Elements, two sculptures that required one of the larger exhibition spaces in Calligraphy Square.
"All my previous exhibitions featured miniature sculptures that were the product of the move from 2-D to 3-D, but this is the first time I have had the opportunity to work at this scale" the Zayed University and Sheikha Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship programme alumna explained.
"It's still very early to see if I will continue to work at this scale but I feel that each year you should have a process that helps me to keep developing my concept."
Of this year's crop of invited artists, Nasir Nasrallah is the individual who knows Sharjah and the March Project best. Not only was he born in the emirate, but he also works for SAF as the director of its education programme. He was vice-president of the Emirates Fine Arts Society between 2006 and 2012 and exhibited at Sharjah Biennial 11 in 2013.
Nasrallah's March Project installation, The Communication Room, is housed in the Majlis Sheikh Mohamed, which forms a part of the traditional souk in Arts Square.
Comprised of four separate but conceptually-related artworks, The Communication Room explores the relationships between time, space, communication technologies and changing patterns of human interaction. It features outmoded methods of communication such as letters, typewriters and an old, analogue telephone.
A work composed of 225 red, white and blue air mail envelopes over which Nasrallah drew a unifying mural while they were originally mounted on his studio wall, Mailing System Rearrangement, is partly a product of Sharjah's postal system.
Nasrallah labelled each of the envelopes with his own address, affixed the same two dirham stamp to each and then posted them from different locations in the emirate. He is recombining the sketch on the wall of the majlis according to the date he receives each letter, producing a new composition that reveals the effects of space, time and chance.
Of the 225 envelopes, 164 have so far made their way to Nasrallah. The first envelope took almost a month to be returned.
Another work, Never to be Opened, presents two sealed envelopes bearing beautiful vintage stamps from Sharjah's pre-federal past. One carries the instruction that it is only to be opened in the past, while the other may only be opened in the future, reminding us that in the present, both are always out of reach.
"I tried to send these to my own address but the [postal service] doesn't accept them anymore," Nasrallah laments. "The first stamp after unification in 1971 is still accepted, but I wanted something that belongs to Sharjah."
The March Project at Sharjah Art Foundation runs until December 30. For more information visit www.sharjahart.org
The biog
Name: Ayisha Abdulrahman Gareb
Age: 57
From: Kalba
Occupation: Mukrema, though she washes bodies without charge
Favourite things to do: Visiting patients at the hospital and give them the support they need.
Role model: Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, Chairwoman of the General Women's Union, Supreme Chairwoman of the Family Development Foundation and President of the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood.
THE SPECS
Engine: 6.75-litre twin-turbocharged V12 petrol engine
Power: 420kW
Torque: 780Nm
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Price: From Dh1,350,000
On sale: Available for preorder now
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
COMPANY PROFILE
Initial investment: Undisclosed
Investment stage: Series A
Investors: Core42
Current number of staff: 47
Famous left-handers
- Marie Curie
- Jimi Hendrix
- Leonardo Di Vinci
- David Bowie
- Paul McCartney
- Albert Einstein
- Jack the Ripper
- Barack Obama
- Helen Keller
- Joan of Arc
A Bad Moms Christmas
Dir: John Lucas and Scott Moore
Starring: Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, Kristen Bell, Susan Sarandon, Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines
Two stars
How%20champions%20are%20made
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Al Jazira's foreign quartet for 2017/18
Romarinho, Brazil
Lassana Diarra, France
Sardor Rashidov, Uzbekistan
Mbark Boussoufa, Morocco
How to wear a kandura
Dos
- Wear the right fabric for the right season and occasion
- Always ask for the dress code if you don’t know
- Wear a white kandura, white ghutra / shemagh (headwear) and black shoes for work
- Wear 100 per cent cotton under the kandura as most fabrics are polyester
Don’ts
- Wear hamdania for work, always wear a ghutra and agal
- Buy a kandura only based on how it feels; ask questions about the fabric and understand what you are buying
BORDERLANDS
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis
Director: Eli Roth
Rating: 0/5
How the UAE gratuity payment is calculated now
Employees leaving an organisation are entitled to an end-of-service gratuity after completing at least one year of service.
The tenure is calculated on the number of days worked and does not include lengthy leave periods, such as a sabbatical. If you have worked for a company between one and five years, you are paid 21 days of pay based on your final basic salary. After five years, however, you are entitled to 30 days of pay. The total lump sum you receive is based on the duration of your employment.
1. For those who have worked between one and five years, on a basic salary of Dh10,000 (calculation based on 30 days):
a. Dh10,000 ÷ 30 = Dh333.33. Your daily wage is Dh333.33
b. Dh333.33 x 21 = Dh7,000. So 21 days salary equates to Dh7,000 in gratuity entitlement for each year of service. Multiply this figure for every year of service up to five years.
2. For those who have worked more than five years
c. 333.33 x 30 = Dh10,000. So 30 days’ salary is Dh10,000 in gratuity entitlement for each year of service.
Note: The maximum figure cannot exceed two years total salary figure.
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
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PULITZER PRIZE 2020 WINNERS
JOURNALISM
Public Service
Anchorage Daily News in collaboration with ProPublica
Breaking News Reporting
Staff of The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky.
Investigative Reporting
Brian M. Rosenthal of The New York Times
Explanatory Reporting
Staff of The Washington Post
Local Reporting
Staff of The Baltimore Sun
National Reporting
T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi of ProPublica
and
Dominic Gates, Steve Miletich, Mike Baker and Lewis Kamb of The Seattle Times
International Reporting
Staff of The New York Times
Feature Writing
Ben Taub of The New Yorker
Commentary
Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times
Criticism
Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times
Editorial Writing
Jeffery Gerritt of the Palestine (Tx.) Herald-Press
Editorial Cartooning
Barry Blitt, contributor, The New Yorker
Breaking News Photography
Photography Staff of Reuters
Feature Photography
Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan and Dar Yasin of the Associated Press
Audio Reporting
Staff of This American Life with Molly O’Toole of the Los Angeles Times and Emily Green, freelancer, Vice News for “The Out Crowd”
LETTERS AND DRAMA
Fiction
"The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
Drama
"A Strange Loop" by Michael R. Jackson
History
"Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America" by W. Caleb McDaniel (Oxford University Press)
Biography
"Sontag: Her Life and Work" by Benjamin Moser (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Poetry
"The Tradition" by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press)
General Nonfiction
"The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care" by Anne Boyer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
and
"The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America" by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books)
Music
"The Central Park Five" by Anthony Davis, premiered by Long Beach Opera on June 15, 2019
Special Citation
Ida B. Wells
Indoor Cricket World Cup - Sept 16-20, Insportz, Dubai
Essentials
The flights
Return flights from Dubai to Windhoek, with a combination of Emirates and Air Namibia, cost from US$790 (Dh2,902) via Johannesburg.
The trip
A 10-day self-drive in Namibia staying at a combination of the safari camps mentioned – Okonjima AfriCat, Little Kulala, Desert Rhino/Damaraland, Ongava – costs from $7,000 (Dh25,711) per person, including car hire (Toyota 4x4 or similar), but excluding international flights, with The Luxury Safari Company.
When to go
The cooler winter months, from June to September, are best, especially for game viewing.
Christopher Robin
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Haley Atwell, Jim Cummings, Peter Capaldi
Three stars
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially
Test
Director: S Sashikanth
Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
Star rating: 2/5
The biog
Name: Mohammed Imtiaz
From: Gujranwala, Pakistan
Arrived in the UAE: 1976
Favourite clothes to make: Suit
Cost of a hand-made suit: From Dh550
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Learn more about Qasr Al Hosn
In 2013, The National's History Project went beyond the walls to see what life was like living in Abu Dhabi's fabled fort:
57%20Seconds
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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.
Awar Qalb
Director: Jamal Salem
Starring: Abdulla Zaid, Joma Ali, Neven Madi and Khadija Sleiman
Two stars
