Youmna Chlala, The Desire Path

New York-based Lebanese artist Youmna Chlala’s garden welcomed visitors on their arrival to the fair as an intervention into the movement and flow of bodies at Art Dubai. The installation reactivated the site by inserting an untamed path to be negotiated both at the threshold and throughout the fair; the basic act of walking reimagined through intuition, impulse and calculation.

Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer who lives and works in New York. Her work investigates the relationship between fate and architecture through drawing, video, prose and performance. Her recent solo shows include Days of Being Wild, at Art In General, New York (2013), and I Am Who You Say I Say Who You Are at the Cultuurcentrum, Belgium (2013).

Clark House Initiative, The Kinematic Modern

Located at Art Dubai Modern, Mumbai-based collective Clark House InitiInitiative’s installation presented a fictional narration on study of modernism through Indian Modernist and Contemporary art and Cinema, working with artist Justin Ponmany to make visual links between various Indian Modernists.

Clark House Initiative is a curatorial collaborative established in 2010 by Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma in Bombay. Their experiments in re-reading of histories, and concerns of representation and visibility, are ways to imagine alternative economies and freedom.

Sunoj D, Zero to the Right

Sunoj D’s sound project commented on the various paradigms of money, trade and commerce that permeate Dubai’s social structure, in the context of his region, Kerala, where the economy and social status is driven by its many migrants to the Middle East and the money they make there. The artist converted his production budget into Dirhams and Indian Rupees vocalising numbers individually and creating a meditative quality to the acts of both reciting and listening to these numbers.

Sunoj D lives and works in Bangalore. His work explores our multi-faceted relationship with nature, drawing on his move from a rural environment to urban dwellings, and subtly revealing the fissures between these two living conditions. He has participated in Spell of Spill Utopia of Ecology, Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi (2013), and When you watch them grow… at National Museum of Natural History, New Delhi (2012).

Maitha Demithan, Live Portraiture

A live scanning booth by Emirati artist Maitha Demithan, visitors and participants of Art Dubai were invited to enter the space and volunteer parts of their body (face, hand, foot) to be scanned. Collected images were stitched together to form a singular portrait of the fair audience, absorbing the individual’s distinctive character as the consumer is consumed.

Emirati artist Maitha Demithan chooses her subjects from the family and friends close to her. She uses scanography to document intense moments of encounter in her various series of installation, video, and transfers on cloth. She has exhibited her work at the UAE Pavilion, Shanghai Expo (2010), and Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2011).

Sara Al Haddad, Therefore; Thereafter

Emirati artist Sara Al Haddad’s site-specific installation intervened with the architecture of a stairwell and was motivated by notions of material value, time and memory. The work was created using balls of plastic yarn to transform the space, leaving behind the aftermath of the repetitive and durational act of crochet.

Sara Al Haddad lives and works in Dubai. She activates interior architectures, and visualises affect through the knitting of life-size sculptural forms and the weaving of text. She has shown her work at The Pavilion, Dubai (2013), and SIKKA Art Fair, Dubai (2013).

Shuruq Harb, Postulant Angels: The Unofficial Catalogue of Paul Klee

An intervention within the Art Dubai Catalogue and the Art Dubai Modern foyer, Palestinian artist Shuruq Harb unveiled a series of paintings and drawings, along with correspondences, documents and requests for the authentication of potential works by Paul Klee, one of the early masters of Modern Art. This year marked an important shift at Art Dubai with the inclusion of Art Dubai Modern and comes at a time where the influence of Modern Art and its history in the region is something that is still being investigated, historicised, contested and re-written.

Shuruq Harb is a visual artist and writer based in Ramallah. She co-founded a number of independent initiatives: ArtTerritories, an online publishing platform, and ‘The River has Two Banks’ an ongoing initiative connecting artists across Jordan and Palestine. She has shown her work at the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012), and Columbia University GSAPP, New York (2013).

Najat Makki, A Story of Currency

Emirati artist Dr Najat Makki’s installation drew on the histories of antique coins found in the Gulf region; at once, a currency, a form of cultural identity and a means of communications, reaffirming power through symbol and portraiture. Makki further expanded on these histories through her paintings, influenced by the narratives behind these various antique currencies.

Dr. Najat Makki lives and works in Dubai. She completed her PhD in Cairo (2011) and artist in residence at Cité Internationales des Arts in Paris (2011) and has participated in the Tehran Biennial (2011). Dr. Makki was the recipient of the Jury Prize at the Sharjah Biennial (1993) and the Owais Art Prize (1994).

Amina Menia, The Crying Stone

Algerian artist Amina Menia project took the form of a tribute to a traveling stone, extracted in Marseilles, crossing by boat to Algiers to be used for construction of social housing, and continuing through to Dubai. A pretext for rethinking the global contemporary world and the speed at which we live, this self-reflecting stone was a symbol for the building common destinies as it breathed in and reflected various realities, continuously shaped by time as it provoked questions of economy, communication, migration and work.

Amina Menia lives and works in Algiers. Her spatial and architectural interventions are subtle arrangements that interact with viewers and the spaces they occupy. She has shown her work at the 11th Sharjah Biennale, and in 2012 undertook a residency in Marseille, working on the displacement of an “extracted” element of Algiers.

Mounira Al Solh, Clogged

An installation, interaction and performance by Syrian artist Mounira Al Solh, Clogged prompted Art Dubai visitors to borrow the typical Syrian bath clog in exchange for their art fair shoes. Through a reversal of the gaze, the work, the clog, functioned as a mediator, as a detail in a political Syrian crisis, a low witness, stuck to the ground, and as an audible performance, the wearer click-clacking against the ground as they roam the fair.

Mounira Al Solh works between Amsterdam and Beirut. Using sociology and anthropology, Al Solh’s work operates according to Ginzburg’s notion of microhistory, aspiring to ask large questions in small places. Her work was shown at the first Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007), and at the New Museum, New York (2012).

Maryam Al Qassimi, Re:Purpose

The grandiose bakhour sculptures at Madinat Jumeirah were ‘activated’ by Emirati artist Maryam Al Qassimi as a performative gesture intended to recognise the absurdity and artifice in the branding of culture and return function back to arbitrary objects, turned decorative sculpture, deemed as cultural icons.

Maryam Al Qassimi is a visual artist living and working in Sharjah. Her work uses found imagery and material to explore the vernacular of the UAE and how its merging of languages has shaped local pop-culture.

Hajra Waheed, Character 1 : In The Rough

Character 1: In the Rough was a performance that took place each night of the fair on an abra in the middle of the Madinat Jumeirah lake. Using light, shadow and found objects, Montreal-based Hajra Waheed’s floating lantern narrated another chapter in the artist’s ongoing body of work Sea Change that stitches back a story on the missing and the missed, glimpsing into the fragments of ourselves we leave behind, and the offerings we make to all those along the way.

Hajra Waheed is a Montreal-based artist whose mixed media practice explores issues related to political history, popular imagination and the broad impact of colonial power. Her exhibitions include (In) the First Circle at Tapies Foundation, Barcelona (2012), and Sea Change at Experimenter, Kolkata (2013).