Abhishek Hazra, Cantordust Touring Machine

Abhishek Hazra’s interactive tour played on the role of the artist or the art expert as having a unique insight into the works on display and the ‘circulatory narrative’ that builds up around art. The title of Hazra’s tour derived from his online alter-ego, and reflected the artist’s interest in Artificial Intelligence, and our relationships with computers and the online world.

Malek Helmy, Chorus of Fair Dust

In Arabic, Habaa2 is the term used to describe the moment when individual particles of dust become visible to the naked eye. Habaa2‘s translation into English rendered the words Dust, Aerosol, Chaos and Vanity. The tour took in shadows, ambient chatter, storage pathways, circulating canapés, the air whirring on the booths walls; it was a walk listening to the choreography of backgrounds to sense oneself in the choreography of a foreground.

Shaikha Al Mazrou, 107

Being developed during an eight-week residency in Bastakiya, Dubai, while Al Mazrou works alongside Abbas Akhavan and other visiting artists, 107 was a wall installation composed of motherboards, appropriated as ready-mades in an exploration of colour, forum and interaction. The work was typical of Al Mazrou’s practice, investigating of the use of mass-produced electronic waste.

Oraib Toukan, White Elephant, 2011

Engaging with the aesthetic and ideology of the art fair booth, Oraib Toukan points to the art historically loaded idea of the White Cube, an idea that has been sidestepped in the region’s sudden rush for the art fair. Treating the booth as medium, Toukan inverted the fairs partition walls back in on themselves to seal off a large void — a discreet but obstructive space on prime Fair real estate. What resulted was an oblique memorial, or a formalist proposal if you will, for the perfect booth.

Hrair Sarkissian, City Fabric

Hrair Sarkissian adapted City Fabric, photographs from the city centre of Yerevan, Armenia, and accompanied this project with a series of delicate site-specific sculptures (Construction). In the last decade, Yerevan has undergone a construction boom. Existing late 19th century houses were demolished and replaced with new luxury buildings, with the aim of encouraging members of the diaspora to fulfill their dream of an Armenian homeland. Unexpectedly, or perhaps not, most of the apartments remain unsold. The entrances of these (some unfinished) buildings tend to be covered with large fabrics on which an image of the building itself is depicted, creating a ghostlike town. At Art Dubai, Sarkissian created a series of new façades for the outside walls of the fair’s home at Madinat Jumeirah.

BIDOUN PROJECTS

Middle Eastern arts organisation Bidoun Projects returned for its fourth year as a project partner of Art Dubai, presenting a live mural by Ali Chitsaz and Mounir Al Solh in collaboration with Bassam Ramlawi, as well as curating Art Park, an underground project space for film, video and talks, that included retrospectives of the work of two pivotal Egyptian artists, Sherif El-Azma and Wael Shawky, curated by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and Sarah Rifky. Bidoun Projects was supported by the Emirates Foundation.