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Dubai routinely celebrates its successes in the vision of a desert city, rising out of the sands to tower over its very humble beginnings, a story measured in the astonishing speed and audacity of its developments made primarily within the financial and construction sectors. The language of the real estate promotion, of luxury housing developments, artificial islands and the tallest of the towers, has dominated, not only tabloids and billboards, but also Dubai’s self-image.
This image may be about to be refashioned into that of a distinctive lifestyle destination via a national initiative to promote the local arts and design industries in a move to enhance the cities as tourist locations. The UAE Minister for Foreign Trade, Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, recently discussed the importance of cultural industries particularly to the tourist industry, explaining that ‘cultural tourists’ spend more and stay longer than other tourists. The arts and culture sector will feature in the diversification of the UAE economy, this being the next level of planned national growth.
2008 was the turning point for the arts in Dubai. In March the Dubai government created the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority to steer and support the growth in the arts in the Emirate. The DCAA, according to government plans, will design cultural strategy, coordinate the physical infrastructure of spaces for the arts, and ‘encourage 200 nationalities living and working together in Dubai to contribute to the culture and arts renaissance.’ (1) The supersized plans of the Khor Dubai project were revealed in pure numbers – 27 kilometres of art park with bicycle paths that will follow the contours of the creek, accommodating ten museums, nine libraries, 14 theatres, the Opera House of Zaha Hadid, 11 galleries, seven centres of art and culture, with laboratories and studios for local and visiting artists. The gargantuan level of the plans fits the ambition to make Dubai the world capital by 2050. But the move towards a concerted public policy on the arts is also a response to the initiatives of Abu Dhabi to import the Louvre and the Guggenheim with the world’s leading architects in tow. With this level of competition, Dubai has decided not to follow with similar importation as much as to re-brand. But how Dubai might create a vibrant local art scene, in the service of cultural tourism or even for its own very transient, local public coming from every part of the world, is the challenge. East German-born, Michael Schindhelm, the Cultural Director of the DCAA explains the desire to define a specific identity for Dubai, one adequate to its particular circumstances as a city from zero. ‘This city’ he clarifies ‘puts into question the criteria of the West, its concepts of history, heritage, culture, time, space and our understanding of reality.’ (2) He is optimistic that Dubai is the ideal place to build a global language for art that functions across cultural differences, which he believes will be needed by future generations worldwide.
Dubai Next: Face of Twenty-first Century Culture, one of the very first initiatives of the DCAA, was part an art/design exhibition and part communications event that took place not in Dubai, but was exported to the small German centre of Weil am Rhein, just across the Swiss/German border from Basel. Timed to coincide with Art Basel and hosted by the Vitra Design Museum, Dubai Next: Face of Twenty-first Century Culture was a soft launching for the new image of Dubai as model for a twenty-first century ‘city of culture’ for a global arena.
The twin curators, architect Rem Koolhaas and Jack Persekian, artistic director of the Sharjah Biennial, devised a range of communication strategies, using the language of promotion – light boxes, billboards, racks of images, maps, short films and architectural models. Art photography and design mixed easily to highlight urban textures and architectural forms – to reflect on Dubai as place.
A photographic survey from the air presented at a glance the accelerated development of Dubai across the twentieth century. Two architectural models were on show, Zaha Hadid’s undulating design for the planned Dubai Opera House and Rem Koolhaas’s model for the proposed Performing Arts Pavilion, both planned for the ‘Khor Dubai’ cultural project. A series of short films and videos of Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Nawaf Al Janafi, Waleed Al Shehhi and Lamya Gargash, were screened in a loop.
But it was particularly the role of photography to link the sense of Dubai with the question of identity. The repeated motif of the existential figure in the sandy landscape in the photographs of Reem Al Ghaith, Tarek Al Ghoussein, and Mohammed Kazem, adjusts the dominant boomtown imagery of Dubai, as a virtual city viewed from above crammed with cranes and skyscrapers, or, alternatively, as a fun park for the bored or itinerant. Working against the vertical drive of the highrise, these photographers introduce the horizon. Air and hubris become gravity and earth.
Land, sea and sand set the scene for the lone human figure, in a restaging of elements of Orientalist imagery. The figures who stand in for the artist as counterpoint to modernity are separated from the cityscape, only ever witnesses to the expansion of global capitalism. An enigmatic figure moves compulsively among the obstacles of Al Ghoussein’s desert, mapping and remapping territories. In Mohammed Kazem’s Flag Series the artist as sentinel watches from the rocks over the fragility of the coastline. An Alice-in-Wonderland figure is lost in time, slipping between the frames within frames of Reem Al Ghaith’s billboard-sized series entitled Held Back. The uninhabited apartments and villas of Lamya Gargash’s luxuriant colour prints revisit the fascination in the West with the privacy of women’s domestic spaces, the so-called Oriental harem. As they operate within the exhibition, each series of photography narrates a somewhat anxious search for an authentic relationship with place, understood romantically rather than architecturally. The result is a metaphoric landscape where place is the origin of culture identity, place stands as a collective dream referred from the past.
The images of Jalal Abuthina, however, push the romance of the desert to its limits. Abuthina photographs the city as a desert, they are interchangeable. Like stills from a horror movie, it is not the towers and architectural spaces that are monstrous and non-human, but rather the inhabitants. In a pared down symbolic language of abayas, kanduras and ‘iconic’ buildings, Dubai and Dubaians pose in a virtual realm.
Dubai Next wanted to present another Dubai beyond the artificiality of the ski slope, the islands and other dual signs of progress and rampant, soulless capitalism. The exhibition however seemed divided in what might make an authentic cultural experience − the expressions of a personalised artistic investigation or the immediacy and the chic appeal of local colour and the normal bustle of the streets at ground level. The street photographs of Reineke Otten and Charlotte Koolhaas, artists based in the Netherlands and both photographer/flâneuse, are an active reminder that Dubai does not lack urban culture. Otten’s montages and Koolhaas’s plethora of images on hangers, like dresses in Marks and Spencer, offered a cornucopia of ephemeral effects, snaps almost disposable by aesthetic, that register the rhythms and hype of the malls, hotels, souqs, supermarkets, tourists and radically mixed population. Their images make a strong claim for the veracity of an everyday language, that which the two photographers call ‘streetology’, in an appeal to the culture that is the texture of life in Dubai, a culture that exceeds the limits of the more official terms of the galleries, museums and art schools. Their project called Bubbles documented the other ‘islands’ of the city, the pre-planned separated zones of work sectors (from Media City to University City), leisure centres, theme-driven neighbourhoods and ethnic communities.
What emerged in the exhibition was a self-conscious image of Dubai, a self-portrait divided in two points of view, a Dubai seen from the ‘inside’, a city looking at itself, and an image from the ‘outside’, a visitor’s take on Dubai. It is a split image, between two curators, across two countries; one image slow and introspective and the second, the fleeting impressions of the traveller or flâneur who walks the backstreets and alleyways to find the spontaneous, the exotic and the curiously foreign − images reminiscent of the generic views and types of a colonial world.
What unified this insider/outsider split was this tendency to restage Orientalist tropes, whether they are the social stereotypes catalogued in the work of Otten and Koolhaas or the return to the desert symbology of the local artists. This divergence of viewpoints ultimately reflects the differences central to the flux in Dubai of the indigenous, the local and the foreign. The campaign logic of Dubai Next was straight forward enough, however one was left wondering why the popular urban realities of Dubai need to be seen exclusively through the eyes of the tourist. Might it be that Dubai is reinventing an Orientalism to sell back to the West? Whose culture? by whom? and for whom? are the questions that the DCAA has yet to elaborate.
No detailed arts strategy plan has yet to be released by the DCAA. There is discussion of government grants for individuals and groups, low rent schemes for artists, and the relocation and consolidation of the range of independent galleries in a centralised zone. But one of the few certainties is the deal signed between the DCAA and the Berlin State Museums, Bavarian State Collections of Paintings in Munich and Saxonian State Museums and Art Collections in Dresden, three renowned museums, who will participate in the planned Universal Museums. These organisations will provide some the best of foreign experts who, in the terms of Michael Schindhelm, will be called upon in the transformation of the local cultural scene.
Elisabeth Stoney teaches visual culture in the University of Sharjah.
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