Still Life: The Sharjah Biennale 8

Martina Corgnati

It only seems a tree, but that’s the end of a long story, and what does seem only a fruit, a date, ready to be eaten in Texas or Milan, it’s instead the survivor of a huge hecatomb.
Massacre of palm trees and dates, whose export represented one of the most active part of Iraqi pre-war economy, and whose number nowadays, because of various recent wars in Iraq, has been depleted from 16 million to 3 million trees. 

Reconstructing the facts of the story was Michael Rakowitz’s goal , winner of one of the best prizes at VIII Sharjah Biennale (SB8), ended last June.

In what war do trees and nature are left in peace? Not even in the old ones. However, dramatising the environmental and cultural disasters of war is an effective idea when translated into visual art means a strong action of reforestation of the death artificial site of the Expo Centre, where Rakowitz placed an avenue of living palm trees in the great open-spaced. At the end of his avenue is an extended label which gives viewers the remarkable history of the date palm.

Trees of various dimensions were placed in big containers full of soils and provided with legends. They could have not fit better in this Bienalle dedicated to Ecology and Political changes, themes who involved both the Biennial Director, Hoor al Qasimi and Artistic manager Jack Persekian, at their second experience together in this eight edition of the most important Arabian and gulf area show. The subject is one of the hottest one, though not new. Past events which were dedicated to the topic “art and ecology”: Beyond Green:. Towards a Sustainable Art at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, Ecotopia at the 2nd ICP triennial of photography and video in New York, and The Ship: the Art of Climate Change at London Museum of Natural History.

The curatorial team, made by artist/teacher Mohammad Kazem from Dubai, Eva Scharrer, the independent curator and art critic based in Basel, Switzerland, and Jonathan Watkins, the Director of the Ikon Gallery in Birminghan (UK), was aware that the topic was not original in the global art system. Nevertheless, in the specific of Arabian area, this choice turned to be wise and rich of interest. Avoiding from the beginning to speak about the so-called pressing issues (Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, nuclear weapon, human rights, democracy, women’ problems and so on), Hoor al Qasimi and Jack Persekian imprinted the Biennale with a 360 degrees view, letting artists fronting themselves with theme and motifs, widely treated by artists all over the world.

Most of them have not ever dealt with such themes, even because speaking of global warming and Politics of Change (as the title says Still life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change) sound as a provocation considering that two steps out of the area, Dubai shines as a miracle, with buildings like Ski Dubai, a complete ski ran inside the huge Emirates Mall, cost 272 millions of dollars, kicking out any environmental rule.

According to Moukhtar Kocache Program Officer, Media, Arts and Culture of the Ford Foundation, Cairo, one third of the cranes of the world are concentrated in this little border of land (The entire UAE is just a little more than 83,000 Square Km), that sucks out unbelievable amount of energy.
Dubai is only 300,000 inhabitants (Sharjah even smaller with its 125,000), 75% of foreigners and only 25% natives, grew up at supersonic speed in spite of the climate conditions and the desert.

We should not be surprised that its luxurious skyscrapers need so much energy.
Not only them, let’s think to all the artificial air conditioning, to the 10 lanes highways that connect a neighbourhood to another going through empty industrial sites and immense parking lots. We are talking of 100 units of CO2 increase per day which keeps sea water fountain always on and tropical gardens clean and green.
UAE produces even culture and recourse than in the next future will offer new opportunity, as the oil, now the prime strength of the area, is going to finish in ten years.
The Louvre, art museums and fairs, contemporary galleries are the proof of what is happening.

Hence, in spite of the contradiction between promoting an “ecologic” art reflection and wasting incredible amount of energy just to realize the show (We read on the back page of the catalogue, that for its realization seventeen trees in eleven metres were killed), it’s still important to consider this international show as an attempt to make people aware of the topic.

Jack Persekian, one of the leading experts of Middle East art who previously realized the excellent show DisOrientation (Berlin 2003), and leading Anadiel Gallery in Jerusalem, gives a great importance to artist role. "We see the role of the artist as fundamental, pivotal", he writes in his essay. "In contrast with scientists and analysts, artists have the freedom to experiment with intellectual inquiry beyond the pressures of market imperatives, where models “do not need to be tested, and found wanting, in terms of profitability or market share because (they have) no purchase on these terms”.

The artists’ autonomous free zone is, nevertheless, tied to a market economy (which rides the tide of every booming wave in the stock market and every gush of millionaires and billionaires) but articulated under different terms. Unbound b he narrow purviews of fields of specialization and the rigid adherence to equations and formulas; artists can bridge and y t connect between disciplines transversally. And they can propose networks and models that interrogate lifestyles and practices critically".

A sort of experimentation that helps artists and people to be aware about ecology and, at the same time, far from common places like the logic of opposition where everything works by binary code: black/white, east/west, rich/poor, good/mean.

Among the 79 artists presented, most exhibited a new topic-specific work.
Starting by Mona Hatoum, whose work Hot Spot, a globe shaped cage, with red neon outlines drawing continents, alluding both to the global warming and the politic tensions, welcomed
the public at the entrance of Expo Center together with a paper cotton map in which continents were become transparent simulacres with right proportions ( no more altered by the common perspective of the globe).
 
Love for geography and history.
For instance in the work of the Italian Claudia Losi, who reconstructed the history of micro-organism from which oil comes, embroidering the morphology over fabric paths, made by locals; or in the work of Amal Kenawi who covered in pink quilt
the ruins of an historical building in the residential area of Sharjah, with a motherly attitude.

A different aspect of ecology, more politic, characterizes Linda Abdul (Afghanistan), winner of The UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts 2007 -Visual Arts Category (US $20,000). The
video and photographical project "Brick sellers of Kabul" responds effectively to the notion of social and human ecology while dealing with specific issues of relevance to humanity at large, such as children’s work, isolation of ruins, destruction.

Very interesting and original the latest work of the Egyptian artist Khaled Hafez, normally related to mediated world than actual reality, Visions of Contaminated Memory. In a triple projection the artist proposes documentary images of a Cairo square coming from Forties and Fifties, associating them with images of the same square shot now, while on the background the Nile flows, majestic and polluted.

A similar reflection in the work of the Egyptian Lara Baladi in Una riflessione in fondo non troppo Roba Vecchia – the Wheel of Fortune, a practicable kaleidoscope and above all the two big photomontages which address a fake notion of  “paradise” through two charismatic figures, mother and father, reaching a melancholic and intimate result.

Algerian Zineb Sedira tried a comparison between contemporary life of the city of Algiers with an older and ambivalent legacy, in Saphir, a photographic-video installation. The ruins of French colonial houses and the simple landscape of the empty horizon, the immense sea towards which a man addresses a glimpse that we do not see but can guess as nostalgic and desiring (better life on the other shore). 

Eva Scharrer admits that some relevant individual and collaborative artistic attempts, concerned with ecological issue (groups like Free Soil, Future farmers, Learinig Group, Superflex, Vitamin Creative Space), were missing.

But the calendar of artistic events is weight too filled up right now to offer each time a complete view on each subject. Some of the stars of ecology were present though. Slovene Marjetica Potrc shows autonomous building based on renovating sources and low consumes system, all created by locals architect.
SOI Project, a group of architects and designers from Tokyo and Bangkok made a performance setting a fake market out of the Biennale area where paper fruits and vegetables made by children of Sharjah was exchanged with the real ones.

In the era of global changes it’s dutiful questioning around the role of art and artists.
The struggle would be lost in the beginning, but that does not prevent artists of doing whatever possible for it. To change the end, like Persekian puts it. Or to keep calling us men, I would add.

 
 
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