Sitting in her gallery, her hands crossed in front of her, Maysaloun seems excitable, even a little anxious. She belongs to a burgeoning Arab art scene in London; a group of people who are now beginning to feel the momentum of international recognition building behind them. With Faraj’s strong faith in the redemptive power of the arts, there is much at stake in the current surge of interest in the Arab art world. ‘If there is any chance for humanity, it’s in the hands of artists’ she assures me, fixing my gaze with dark, sincere eyes. Having settled in London in 1982, following the escalation of the Iran-Iraq war, Faraj has since been endeavoring to bring together, in her own words, ‘Iraq’s scattered talents in the wind’. With this goal in mind, she founded iNCiA (International Network for Contemporary Iraqi Artists) in 1995, and Aya gallery in 2002, with her husband the architect Ali Mousawi. With the opening of the Dubai branch of Christies in 2005, followed by Sotheby’s less than a year later, the Arab art market has since experienced an unprecedented boom. In this country, The British Museum’s 2006 Word into Art exhibition, featuring Faraj’s work alongside artists from the Modern Middle East including ones she championed in her earlier career, significantly raised the profile of contemporary art from the region. The exhibition later travelled to the DIFC in Dubai, in an obvious gesture of recognition of the Gulf as a new cultural hub.
Although critics have been wary of presenting the surge of interest in Arabic art as a political phenomenon, London-based artists such as Faraj see an opportunity to counteract the reductive presentation of the Islamic world. Faraj’s work Asma Allah al-Husna (The 99 Names of God) is evidence of her belief in art as a profound response to grotesque misrepresentation. This work was provoked by a comment from a gallery visitor, who asked Faraj whether the ninety-nine Names of Allah were linked to 9/11, given her fascination with conspiracy theory. The visitor had even alerted the police! ‘I was shocked,’ Faraj intones. ‘These are the Names of God, beginning with Al-Rahman, Al-Raheem (The Merciful, The Compassionate). Islam is and has always been, peace, harmony and respect for all living things.’ Faraj’s Asma Allah al-Husna makes use of cylinder seals, invented in Mesopotamia in 5000 BC as an early form of print making, in which a mirror image is engraved into a stone or clay cylinder. Faraj has completed fifty so far, and watching her handle the works, one can see the role even a small act of creative labour has to play in keeping alive a culture confronted with destruction. ‘It is not just Iraq’s galleries, museums and libraries that have been bombed to their foundations. It is also the treasures that lay beneath the ground. This is where history began, where man first recorded on clay tablets their deeds and victories. I feel a deep responsibility towards keeping the art of my people alive. Through art, I believe we can find peace.’
Laila Shawa is another powerful voice in the London-based Arabic art scene, and was also a contributor to the Word in Art exhibition. Born in Gaza, Shawa's training has been cosmopolitan – she's earned art degrees in Cairo and Italy, and has also studied under the great Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokaschka. Although October sees Shawa's latest series, Mirage, showing at the DIFC in Dubai, she is more cautious than Faraj of the sudden interest in the Arab art world. Smoking in her apartment, vividly hung with the works of her fellow artists, she leans forward with a half-smile, 'I have never considered myself to be part of a group, you know. Of course, I am Palestinian, but as a person I'm a complex mixture of cultures.' Shawa's sense of personal and artistic integrity has not always won her followers. 'I was accused initially of a lack of shared experience with the Palestinian people. Since my family never left our home in Gaza, I don't have the same memories of dispossession. The Palestinian school of art came to be influenced by the nostalgia and romanticisation that grew out of these experiences of exile, and this was not a form of expression to which I belonged.' Shawa is a member of the Palestinian elite. Christa Paula, who is currently writing a monograph on the artist, is constantly struck by the bravery of the her career, 'Laila has been criticised for her ancestry and 'class' throughout her working life, but has determinately stayed true to her self.'
Like Maysaloun Faraj, Laila Shawa is compelled to express the plight of her country. 'I came back to Gaza during the First Intifada, and felt helpless in the face of what I saw on the streets. I thought long and hard. Finally I decided: leave that reality as it is.' This period saw the development of one of Shawa's distinctive mediums, which merges documentary-style photography with the vivid expressionism of her paintings and silk screens. Given her determination to be first and foremost an artist, above any political or national allegiance, her latest series, Mirage, might be seen as a manifestation of purely aesthetic desires. The works take Shawa's palette to a new adrenalin-high, with traditional Islamic geometric patterns warped into optical illusions in pop pigments. 'In October, people will be drawn initially to the fabulous colour, but the purpose of the series is also to tease the mind…' Shawa gestures around her hallway lined wall to wall with the series that she has displayed for my benefit. Given the surroundings, the movement transforms her into a character in a Disneyland cathedral. Fantasy aside, Mirage is a serious comment on the rapid development of the Gulf. 'What is Dubai?' Shawa asks. 'It's high-tech fashions, Las Vegas, and its also the Islamic world. The city is being pulled in many different directions. Which way is it going to go?'
While Yara El-Sherbini belongs to a younger generation of British Arab artists, like Laila Shawa, El-Sherbini never stops provoking and questioning her audience. What colour is the universe? What colour is the future? What colour is Michael Jackson? These questions come from El-Sherbini’s latest project, Universality Challenge, which took place for the first time the day before our interview. ‘It went so well!’ Yara beams. ‘I had SOAS pitted against a team from the general public, and the ‘normal’ team won by a long, long way. We covered everything, the labour party, teenage pregnancy, Do they drink Um Bongo in the Congo?’ I wait for her to go on. ‘No, I’m asking you seriously. Do they?’ The answer, unfortunately, is being kept under lock and key, in case it gets leaked to new competitors. El-Sherbini has a strong sense of herself as British, and is wary of efforts to read her work by the colour of her skin, or through her faith in Islam. Despite this, she concedes that 9/11 was a major factor in compelling her to explore British popular culture. She winces, ‘I hate that every article has to include that date, but its impact on me is undeniable.’
Even before her graduation from Slade in Fine Art Media, El-Sherbini was experimenting with strategies of how to get audiences and art-goers to think for themselves. ‘We live our life, we do our thing, we read the papers, but we don’t talk about it. When people go to a gallery and look at a painting hung on the wall, they don’t necessarily engage.’ Over the last two years, El-Sherbini has hosted numerous ‘alternative’ pub quizzes, and her particular brand of live art is beginning to infiltrate the great London art institutions, with a Treasure Hunt conducted earlier this month in The Museum of London, and a date set for a ‘pub quiz’, believe it or not, at The National Portrait Gallery on the last weekend of July. These gigs may point to conventional artistic success, but El-Sherbini prefers more informal spaces for her pieces. ‘Working in unexpected formats outside of the gallery space can be more effective because it confronts people within their everyday life.’ In her capacity as a live artist, and one not directly influenced by her Arabic heritage, El-Sherbini’s practice may at first seem incomparable with Laila Shawa’s or Maysaloun Faraj’s. What they share, however, is a strong awareness of identity, and an urge to confront the ingrained assumptions of their viewers/audiences. ‘I might be naive to think I can change the world,’ says El-Sherbini, turning her ever-questioning eye in on herself, ‘but a quote I’ve always loved is: “Change the mind of someone who will change the mind of someone who will change the world.” This doesn’t necessarily mean tricking people into altering their opinions, just occasionally pulling the rug from beneath their feet.’
While Laila Shawa captures her viewer’s eye with raucous colour in order to speak the horrors of the intifida, Yara El-Sherbini lures her audience into the pub to confront them with the entirety of British pop culture. There’s a shared strategy here, of drawing the viewer in with the familiar and pleasing, only to hit them with the concealed impact of political content. And it’s a strategy that’s strikingly paralleled by a story told to me by Jananne Al-Ani, an Iraqi-born artist known for her photographic and moving image works. Actually, it’s not so much a story as a fact: In Kosovo there is a blue butterfly that feeds exclusively on the wild flower, Artemisia Vulgaris. Like the poppy, Artemisia Vulgaris thrives where the top soil has recently been disturbed. Follow this particular species of butterfly, dig, and you are likely to uncover the mass graves of the Albanian victims of Serbian genocide. This bitter-sweet relationship between politics and aesthetics comes across as especially complex in Al-Ani’s work. Although she sees her artworks as cultural products and not political statements, it’s undeniable that her interest in photography, film and video was initially provoked by the political landmark of the first Gulf War. ‘During the war I was living in England, and the story I was getting, through these mediated images, was so grotesquely skewed and extreme. It made me critical of photography and film in a way that I hadn’t been before.’
Al-Ani is currently working on The Aesthetics of Disappearance – a Land Without People, a three-year long project funded by the (AHRC) Arts and Humanities Research Council. Guide (2008) is one of a pair of films that are the project’s first finished productions. The work is a two minute looped film. It shows us a nondescript desert track, cast over by a shadow that elongates from the bottom left hand corner of the screen and introduces a man wearing a red and white keffiyeh and holding a black carrier bag. As we watch the man recede away from us down the track, an ambient soundtrack performs a peculiar silencing of the desert wind that stirs his robe and blows away his soundless footsteps. As the man approaches the distant skyline, he suddenly blips out of existence - only for the loop to kick in, returning him to the start of his journey. Jananne Al-Ani ejects the disc and quietly smiles. ‘I like the potential for ordinariness in film; out in the desert I often shot long takes where nothing much happened.’ The Aesthetics of Disappearance… will explore the desert as a fantasy space in the Western imaginary, perceived as a non-place on which to build dreams and wield power. Al-Ani has plans to continue the project from the air, filming and photographing contested sites in the Middle East - stretches of desert that may have archeological, bliblical, roman or contemporary significance. ‘Aerial photography is interesting because the shift in perspective can allow you to see what’s really happening on the ground’.
Artists may be celebrating the surge of international interest in the Arab art world, but perhaps we should take a lesson from Jananne Al-Ani and see the situation from a different perspective. There are artists and critics who view the booming market in the Gulf as a distraction from the wealth of material that has always been present in the cultural production of the Arab world. Practitioners from the Arab and Middle Eastern nations tend to be sharply in tune with their own provincial art scenes, and are also aware of the influence of so-called ‘cultural centres’ in Europe and America. Within this frame, it is London that appears as the un-informed ‘outsider’, only now waking up to the wealth of Arab contemporary art and its rich cultural heritage. ‘There are two parallel worlds,’ says Al-Ani, ‘one completely in the know and one completely in the dark.’ While it is indisputable that major artists like Maysaloun Faraj and Laila Shawa will benefit from the upsurge of Western interest in Arab art, it is possible that the West will be the real beneficiaries of this exchange. If we are to fulfil Maysaloun Faraj’s dream of a world at peace, or approach Laila Shawa and Yara El-Sherbini’s vision of a public that questions and self-criticises, we would do well to pay attention to the creative minds speaking out from a part of the world that is so routinely and grotesquely misinterpreted by the West.
PLUGS
Jananne Al-Ani’s ‘The Guide’ and ‘Flock’ are currently showing at the Whistable Biennale, running until 6th July. www.whistablebiennale.com
Laila Shawa’s ‘Mirage’ is showing on the 10th October, at the DIFC, Dubai.
Maysaloun Faraj’s Boats and Burdens, Kites and Shattered Dreams; will show at Aya gallery, 15 Fulham High Street, with provisional dates of 12 Nov – 12 Dec 2008.
Yara El-Sherbini is hosting one of her alternative pub quizzes at The National Portrait Gallery on the 24th and 25th July. See www.yaraelsherbini.com for updates.
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