The Third Line
Art from Iran, the U.K, Holland and Dubai
Democracy, Individualism and Islam
Monir Farmanfarmaian, Convertible Series, G6-V1, 2010. Mirror and reverse glass painting
on plaster and wood, variable size.
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
Monir Farmanfarmaian 2004–2013
The Third Line is proud to present a survey exhibition of Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian that reflects upon the past decade of her remarkable artistic journey. Showcasing works from 2004 until now - including those being displayed for the first time - the exhibition highlights Monir's stellar career as a pioneer in contemporary Iranian art.
Mapping a chronological trajectory through the different series of works that Monir completed over the past nine years, the exhibition follows the evolution of her signature style aineh-kari mirror mosaics and her investigation into divine cosmology. The principal theme in her art practice of correlating mysticism with numerology, Islamic geometry and architecture remains a quintessential feature within this exhibit.
Through wall-based panels and free-standing works, Monir presents a masterful balance of meticulous craft and contemporary abstraction that utilizes an interaction of surface texture, light and reflection, colour and form. She also delves into media such as drawings in felt marker and pen and ink, layering works of coloured lines to trace structures of nomadic tents, minarets and models of architectural sculptures. Employing techniques from her Iranian heritage that date back to the sixteenth century, Monir chooses to return to the origins of abstraction and theology, and moves beyond the craft to present a modern interpretation of both the medium and the content.
Monir strives for perfection in her intricate drawings and kaleidoscopic mirror mosaics, which is highlighted in her impressive career that spans over 60 years. From early beginnings in Iran, and a later period in New York, where she was a contemporary of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Frank Stella, Monir began to tie the two dichotomies of her influences—arriving at modern abstraction in form through the use of Islamic geometry found in Iranian architecture. The resulting work has been an unconventional marriage between the deeply traditional and the genuinely avant-garde, placing her in a league of her own.
Jonas Staal, New World Summit - Berlin, 2012. Photo: Lidia Rossner.
Art After Democratism:
A project by Jonas Staal
Art After Democratism is Dutch visual artist Jonas Staal's first solo presentation in the United Arab Emirates. Staal (b. 1981) has become known as an artist actively engaged with social and political issues, specifically attempting through his art to contribute to new forms of democratic practice.
In Art after Democratism Staal explores new forms of art practices outside of what he calls the doctrine of "democratism," which refers to a politics that uses important emancipatory concepts such as "democracy," "freedom" and "equality" to pursue contradictory aims, for example when states or organizations impose the idea of non-democratic measures being necessary to "enforce democracy." Democratism is what Staal believes today provides the dominant framework and system of valuating artistic practice. In Traffic, he will exhibit his two most prominent projects. The first part of the exhibition is called "Mapping Democratism" and comprises the fifth installment of his series "Art, Property of Politics" (2010–ongoing). The second part is entitled "Acting Fundamental Democracy," and comprises an overview of his "New World Summit" (2012–ongoing) project.
In "Art, Property of Politics" Staal investigated private art collections of political parties, and even the former art practices of prominent politicians, attempting to show the intrinsic relationship between art and politics under democratism. The fifth installment of the "Art, Property of Politics" series, titled Monument to Capital, is specifically developed for the Art After Democratism exhibition in Traffic, and departs from the Barclays Capital's Skyscraper Index, an index managed by the international investment bank Barclays visualizing the "unhealthy correlation between construction of the next world's tallest building and an impending financial crisis." Barclays's research shows that when the Dow Jones index goes down, the buildings literally go up, as if the architectural landmarks of the high-capitalist countries unconsciously respond to an unfolding crisis in an attempt to capture, to make "solid" what would otherwise melt into air. In Monument to Capital Staal takes this research of Barclays as his starting point to discuss the role of architecture within democratism.
The "New World Summit" is an artistic and political organization founded by Staal, aiming to provide by means of "alternative parliaments" a platform to organizations that are placed "outside" democratism. The first edition of the New World Summit on May 4 and 5, 2012, in the Sophiensaele in Berlin hosted four political and three juridical representatives of organizations placed on so-called international designated terrorist lists to reflect on their own practices, histories, and views on democracy. On December 29, 2012, the second edition of the New World Summit took place in Leiden, the Netherlands; and in the beginning of December the first public New World Summit pavilion was built in Kochi, India. The installation in Traffic offers an overview of the different editions of the New World Summit so far by means of a prototype of the "New World Summit - Bureau," comprising scale models of the different alternative parliaments, video documentation of the summits, and the research library of the organization. During the period of the exhibition, the bureau will be regularly in use by the team of the New World Summit.
Cevdet Erek, Courtyard Ornamentation with 4 Sounding Dots and a Shade, 2013. Four-channel sound, directional loudspeakers, and architectural additions, duration variable. Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo by Antonia Alampi.
Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah
A Qawwali song in Urdu fills one of the narrow lanes of the new Sharjah Art Foundation spaces. It has been interpreted by a group of about thirty Pakistani musicians, sitting on the floor, while art professionals arrived en masse for the most anticipated event in the region. The music is a part of Dictums 10:120 (2013), a new work by Wael Shawky, one of the many new commissions by the Sharjah Art Foundation, which deals with what we might call the art-world language, that strange sub-species of English which, despite its universal ambitions, often ends up acquiring a solipsistic tone. But that's just one of the many idiosyncrasies of the contemporary art world that are here subtly evoked. The composition—in Urdu, the most commonly spoken local language, also intelligible to those who speak Hindi—is the result of a reflection, discussion, and reconstruction of the curatorial statement by the workers of the biennial itself.
Here, on the other side of exclusion, for once, the Pakistanis are the only ones to have linguistic access to the work, gaining "authority for a time," as the artist himself affirms. The almost ghostly role and position of visibility and invisibility of the workers is also addressed in Dilbar (2013), a black-and-white cinematic and evanescent film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Chai Siri, whose subject is a construction worker who helped build the new spaces of the Sharjah Art Foundation. Here, too, sound assumes a dominant position, in which the amplified and rhythmical noise of the construction site marks the passage of time and the pace of work, signifying the abysmal difference between intellectual and physical labor.
These two important works are both winners, among others, of the eleventh Sharjah Biennial Art Prize—and they contain the seeds of some central aspects of the exhibition.
Curator Yuko Hasegawa's attention is clearly directed towards the space of the Islamic courtyards, and Sharjah's city center is certainly full of them. Many works are realized specifically for various courtyards that are part of the Sharjah Art Foundation exhibition spaces, while others address the courtyard metaphorically, as a zone in-between public and private, where the intimate meets the political, where the intimate can become the political. Effectively, this is the element that has been identified as the possible link among different cultures, traditions, religions: the courtyard, that is, as the new cartography of experience. Particularly evocative to this effect are the site-specific works Taste of a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok (2013) by Otobong Nkanga, a garden of contemplation made up of images, poems, stones, and small trees; and Courtyard Ornamentation with Four Sounding Dots and a Shade (2013) by Cevdet Erek, which is "inhabited" by a minimal and repetitive vibration, some sort of sound pattern that invites you into a physical exploration of its architecture. Standing at its center, one feels the beating heart of encounter, of differing rhythms.
Indeed, sound is the predominant component of many works here, seemingly chosen as the preferred instrument through which linguistic, cultural, and social barriers are to be overcome. Its rhythms are employed for their ability to gather and attract, to disseminate in a viral manner in Tarek Atoui's Within (2013), a collaborative performance involving ten drummers from all over the world. Performances take place at various spots throughout the city, but the finale will be a unique ensemble on the rooftops of the Foundation's exhibition spaces during the finissage.
Idris Khan
Beginning at the End
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
Idris Khan is a seminal artist of his generation, known for his minimal, yet emotionally charged photographs, drawings, videos and sculptures. He has transformed texts, musical scores, dances and artworks into investigations of appropriation, time, and memory. Digitally layering photographs or film clips of the appropriated material, he creates dense accumulations that empathise with the past while engaging with contemporary discourses. Individual notes, words and images become translucent marks and traces that form new, contemplative, patterns and rhythms.
Beginning at the End introduces a transformative new body of work that reveals a deep investigation of creation—both of the self and of art. Inspired by the Black on Black works of many abstract expressionists, Khan uses black oil-based ink on black-screened paper to create drawings that pay tribute to artists of the movement such as Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, amongst others.
Khan has created ten passages of writing, and with each an artwork, responding to the words of 9th-century Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Al-Ghazali. For each piece, Khan committed a process of transcription and translation into Arabic, working with Louisa Macmillan (formally the Eisler Curator of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art at the British Museum). Creating different radial formations by hand-stamping the Arabic script, Khan directs his practice inwards towards a journey of self-discovery. The works transcend the essence of the words while containing the weight of the metaphysical concepts from which they were derived.
In the gallery itself Khan installs a wall drawing entitled The Essence of this Existence by meticulously stamping the texts that make up the ten drawings with black and blue oil-based ink onto a prepared gesso wall. The tension between the start of a work and its completion, between its essence and its meaning, are part of an exploration into the relationship art has to its creators and subsequently to its viewers.
Idris Khan was born in Birmingham in 1978 and lives and works in London.
Rebloged from Art Agenda
