ART DUBAI ConTempoRARymARCH 19-22, 2014

WELCOME TO ART DUBAI 2014.

Over the last seven years, Art Dubai, the leading international art fair in the Middle East and South Asia, has become a cornerstone of the region’s booming contemporary art community. Recognised as one of the most globalised meeting points in the art world today, Art Dubai places an emphasis on maintaining its intimate, human scale while foregrounding quality and diversity.

The eighth edition of Art Dubai takes place March 19-22, 2014, at Madinat Jumeirah. Besides the gallery halls, the fair’s extensive programme includes commissioned projects, artists’ and curators ‘residencies, radio and film, an exhibition of new works by winners of the annual The Abraaj Group Art Prize and the critically acclaimed Global Art Forum. Art Dubai is part of Art Week, an umbrella initiative that highlights the plethora of exhibitions, projects and events that now coincide with the fair each March, the most dynamic time in the UAE’s cultural calendar. Special events include Design Days Dubai, the only fair in Asia dedicated to product and furniture design; Sikka, the fair run by Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) and dedicated to new work by UAE-based artists; and Galleries Nights, featuring 40 new exhibitions across Al Quoz and the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC); plus other projects, museum shows and major events throughout the Emirates, Qatar and the Gulf. We look forward to welcoming you in March 2014.

VISITING ThE FAIR

LOCATIOnMadinat JumeirahAl Sufouh Road, Umm SuqeimExit 39 (Interchange 4) from Sheikh Zayed RoadDubai, UAE

OpEnIng TIMEs WEDnEsDAy MARCh 191PM – 4PM Art Dubai Ladies Preview3PM – 6PM Global Art Forum4PM – 9:30PM Art Dubai Opening (by invitation only) ThURsDAy MARCh 203PM – 6PM Global Art Forum4PM – 9:30PM Art Dubai Programme and Gallery halls FRIDAy MARCh 212PM – 9:30PM Art Dubai Programme and Gallery halls3PM – 6PM Global Art Forum sATURDAy MARCh 2212PM – 6:30PM Art Dubai Programme and Gallery halls

ADMIssIOn Tickets to Art Dubai can be purchased onsite during the fair. One-Day pass: 50 AEDThree-Day pass: 80 AED Children 18 years old and under are admitted free of charge. University students can also enter free upon show of student ID. All visiting groups must pre-book by calling Art Dubai at +971 4 358 7121.

It is suggested that students move through the exhibition in small groups looking at and discussing objects,graphics, and relevant text. These materials include an exhibition briefing sheet for adults to help focus students’ thoughts in each section of the exhibition.

gALLERy ETIqUETTE

· Please do not touch the artworks for your safety and the safety of the artworks. · Photography is allowed in the exhibition. · Please note that food, drinks, and chewing gum are not allowed in the exhibition. · Pencils can be used for writing or sketching. No crayons, pens, markers, or wet materials are permitted in the fair. · Please do not lean on walls or pedestals and do not use them as writing surfaces. · Please silence mobile phones and please use a soft voice so that you do not distract other groups in the exhibition. · Running is not permitted within the exhibition so you do not hurt yourself or damage the artworks.

INTRODUCTIONThe Guide offers a starting point for visitors who wish to know more about how to approach contemporary art through the fair. The guide draws on 14 of the artworks featured in the fair to illustrate key points on contemporary art. Although these points are by no means exhaustive, they often recur in the artworks shown in this exhibition, and can be applied to view-ing all kinds of contemporary art.

About contemporary art:Questions such as “What is art?” and “What is the function of art?” are relatively new. Creating art that defies viewers’ expectations and artistic conventions is a distinctly modern concept. however, artists of all eras are products of their rela-tive cultures and time periods.

Contemporary artists are in a position to express them and respond to social issues in a way that artists of the past were not able to. When experiencing contemporary art, viewers use different criteria for judging works of art than criteria used in the past. Instead of asking, “Do I like how this looks?” viewers might ask, “Do I like the idea this artist presents?” having an open mind goes a long way towards understanding, and even appreciating, the art of our own era.

Strictly speaking, the term “contemporary  art” refers to art made and produced by artists living today. Today’s artists work in and respond to a global environment that is culturally diverse, technologically advancing, and multifaceted.

Working in a wide range of  mediums, contemporary artists often reflect and comment on modern-day society. When engaging with contemporary art, viewers are challenged to set aside questions such as, “Is a work of art good?” or “Is the work aesthetically pleasing?” Instead, viewers consider whether art is “challenging” or “interesting.” Contemporary artists may question traditional ideas of how art is defined, what constitutes art, and how art is made, while creating a dialogue with—and in some cases rejecting—the styles and movements that came before them.

(Source: http://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/classroom_resources/curricula/contemporary_art/background1.html)

ARENA hALL

JOhARA hALL

7 kEy sTATEMEnTs OF COnTEMpORARy ART WhICh REOCCUR In DIFFEREnT ARTWORks

1. Contemporary art is often irreverent and humorous, and mixes ‘high’ with ‘low’ culture.-- A24: Rui Chafes / J7: Rashaad Newsome

2. Contemporary art installations often make full use of the space they are in. In contemporary art, artists go beyond the borders and confines of a picture or painting frame or pedestal, often creating works that fill an entire room or space.Site-specific art reclaims public space through art. The city becomes a zone of experimentation and perspective shift, encouraging the artist and the audience to see the landscape and objects within it in a new way. Questions about time, impermanence, memory, artifice and locality arise, providing raw materials for the artist and points of access for the audience.

-- A8: Pascale Marthine Tayou / A10: Lara Favaretto

3. Contemporary artists are often influences by their context or background, be is personal cultural or socio-political, and draw upon this when they create their artworks, as well as make reference to it.

-- J7: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme / A8: Chen Zhen

4. Contemporary artists often explore new art forms and experiment with artistic mediums, such as new media or digital art, and sound art.

-- A16: Annabel Daou / J4: Juz Kitson / J16: :mentalKLINIK

5. Contemporary art often deals with current political, social and cultural issues. -- J18: Mahardhika Yudha / A 36: Bhart Kher

6. Contemporary art often revisits and reworks traditional myths and folklore to explore contemporary issues.

-- A34: Raed Yassin / A18: Damien Deroubaix

7. Contemporary art often appropriates from art history and other cultural landmarks.AppropriationContemporary artists, like many artists that preceded them, may acknowledge and find inspiration in art works from previous time periods in both subject matter and formal elements. Sometimes this inspiration takes the form ofappropriation. 

-- J6: Rashid Rana / A21: Kamrooz Ara

1. Contemporary art is often humorous, and mixes ‘high’ with ‘low’ culture.

CARBON 12, BOOTh A24

“I do not believe in objects, but I am convinced that only through objects will I be able to show their idea.” (Rui Chafes)

One of Portugal’s most prominent artists, Rui Chafes creates large-scale sculptures out of steel. Largely abstracted, Chafes’ matte-black sculptures are embodiments of his interpretations of art historical references, including flames (Boticelli), mannequin heads (De Chirico), and other organic forms and/or people. In particular, Chafes considers the German Romanticists and the poet Novalis, who the artist has illustrated and translated into Portugese, major influences on his work. Chafes’ works are site specific and interact with external spaces and architecture, playing with viewer’s perceptions as he denotes a material laden with

Rui Chafes, Tati, 2013, Steel, 144x42x56cm, Courtesy of Carbon 12, Dubai

weight and non-malleability with delicacy, weightlessness and a hint of malice.

Tati serves as a poetic, abstracted homage to French director Jacques Tati, or a monument to the  absence  of Tati. The balanced and proportioned sculpture resembles the clumsy, humorous gesticulations of Tati’s “Monsieur hulot” alter-ego, but without the man. It looks like balloon that is being blown by the missing human, a literal monument to absence. The viewer is invited to embody Tati.

CARROLL / FLETChER, BOOTh J7

“He is very much a child of this generation who embraces everything that moves and is pop and is music, and puts it in a blender and makes it their own.” (Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1, New York)

“Rashaad Newsome’s practice cuts across performance, video, collage and sculpture in order to explore the symbolism associated with contemporary African-American culture. his work addresses issues of race, class, gender and sexuality through cultural amalgams, combining elements of pop-based imagery and the visual language of hip hop culture, such as diamond bling and urban beats, with “high cultural” forms including heraldry, ornament and the aesthetics of the baroque.

Newsome’s fascination with the aesthetics of “high culture” is evident in his series of intricate, richly detailed collages com-posed of layers of images of luxury items sourced from glossy magazines, encased in ornate antique frames embellished with some of the artist’s signature motifs. This distinct visual language is also developed in the opulent herald and King of Arms series, inspired by an exploration of Western European coats of arms.

Creating his own distinct language and coat of arms, Newsome collages old and new status symbols, layering and comparing the power of an armorial shield and a golden chain, withholding judgment to revel in the grandeur of both. For example, the series of work, titled “King of Arms,” remixes the Western European coats of arms, infusing the Renaissance heraldry tradition with hip-hop swagger and is a hypnotizing medley of Baroque and bling.

Rashaad Newsome, Power and Periphery (NOLA), 2012, Collage in customized antique frame, 83.8 x 64.8 x 8.3 cm, Courtesy of the artist

GALLERIA FRANCO NOERO, BOOTh A10

Italian artist Lara Favaretto provokes and engages her audiences with work that is both playful and celebratory while paradoxically evoking the inevitability of failure and decay.

Favaretto has worked with a range of media throughout her career including performance, sculpture, installation and video.

Favaretto’s projects are occasions for the artist to collaborate with an audience in order to co-script magic realist scenarios that will either take place in actual space or simply unfold in thought. her sculptures, videos, performances and photographs are meeting points.

They are sites where dormant ideas await trial by public improvisation. Favaretto’s works often call for a celebration

without cause around objects stripped of any possible mysticism – their banal functionality laid bare as an absurd failure that inspires tragic-comic surprise.

The cubical sculpture “Lay it on thick” — made of compressed, bright-green confetti — is slowly falling apart along its top edges and evokes utopia in ruins. The confetti cube on view is made up of nearly 400 pounds of compressed confetti, and it is meant to gradually fall apart over the course of the exhibition.

The work exists as a mess of confetti intended to flake, disintegrating the formal and former idea of cube. Despite the allusion to parties, there is nothing celebratory about Favaretto’s confetti. The work indicate failure, dissolution, and formlessness. There is no interest in the independence of form, the cube, only the uneasiness and discomfort provoked by a pile of confetti on a gallery floor, but after all, it all comes with the delight of a colorful exhaustion.

Lara Favaretto, Lay it on thick, 2013, confetti, 90 x 90 x 90 cm approx., courtesy the artist and Galleria Franco Noero

2. Contemporary art installations often make full use of the space they are in. In contemporary art, artists go beyond the borders and confines of a picture or painting frame or pedestal, often creating works that fill an entire room or space.

Site-specific art  reclaims public space through art. The city becomes a zone of experimentation and perspective shift, encouraging the artist and the audience to see the landscape and objects within it in a new way. questions about time, impermanence, memory, artifice and locality arise, providing raw materials for the artist and points of access for the audience.

GALLERIA CONTINUA, BOOTh A8

Pascale Marthine Tayou  (b. 1967 in Yaoundé, Cameroon) began his career as an artist in the 1990s, when he changed his name, taking a double name in the female form: Pascal(e) Marthin(e).

his work is deliberately mobile, elusive of pre-established schema, heterogeneous. It is always closely linked to the idea of travel and of coming into contact with what is other to self, and is so spontaneous that it almost seems casual. The objects, sculptures, installations, drawings and videos produced by Tayou have a recurrent feature in common: they dwell upon an individual moving through the world and exploring the issue of the global village.

The colonne is a monument made of saucepans. Objects from everyday life, vertically stacked, the accumulation is erected in a fragile equilibrium standing 6m tall. The work is characterized by a playful dimension but reveals itself gradually upon closer examination and the paradoxical aspect emerges. While its development relates to family history, taking inspiration from the African imaginary, it extends beyond this in its reflection of the question of hunger on the African continent. Within such an emblematic form as the classical column, the artist offers to give shape to Western stereotypes. The work also tends to allow the mysticism of the totem pole and the solemnity of the classical column to merge. This is the great strength of this reinvented column: it invites us on a journey into the artist’s personal life, and into a world in which physical and spiritual borders lose their significance, in order to build new meaning.

Pascale Marthine Tayou, Colonne Pascale, 2011, metal coated with enamel pots, 680 x 70 x 70 cm, Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins\Photo Lorenzo Fiaschi

Carroll/Fletcher, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, The Inci-dental Insurgents: The Part About the Bandits, Chapter 2

3. Contemporary artists are often influences by their context or background, be it personal cultural or socio-political, and draw upon this when they create their art-works, as well as make reference to it.

CARROLL / FLETChER, BOOTh J7

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b.1983) work together across a range of sound, image, installation and performance practices. Their work explores issues to do with the politics of desire and disaster, subjectivity and the absurdities of contemporary practices of power. Their practice increasingly examines the possibilities of sound, image and environment, taking on the form of interdisciplinary installations and live audio-visual performances. They have exhibited and performed internationally and most recently founded the sound and image performance collective Tashweesh.

Meant as an investigation into the possibilities for the future rather than the past, and using literary and factual texts as starting points (writings of Victor Serge and Bolano amongst others), a convoluted story situated in multiple times starts to emerge. The artists take the figure of the bandit to explore their own position as artists and the common search for a language of the moment—a radical new imaginary that can begin to open the horizon for other ways of becoming and being in the world. Ironically these figures, though seemingly incidental, most dearly articulate the incompleteness and inadequacies in existing oppositional movements’ political language and imaginary.

GALLERIA CONTINUA, BOOTh A8

Chen Zhen (1955-2000) disillusioned by post-Maoist reform politics, left China in the mid-eighties. Isolation, censorship, and constant repression by the Chinese communist party constituted a tenor according to which a political threat was suspected to linger behind every new artwork, meanwhile the Chinese avant-garde artists sought to create harmony by difference. As the door to the United States was closed to them, Chen Zhen went in 1986 to Paris.

his conceptual installations and sculptures retain a kind of optimism rooted in the humanistic spirit of 1980s China, in which the artist maintains a role as social and political commentator. his mature work of the 1990s, the last decade of his life, increasingly emphasized the need for communication—or what the artist might refer to as “synergy”—between diverse cultural and political spheres.

he was a boundary crosser, a ‘cultural homeless’. his work of communication and cultural confrontation unfolds the artist’s determined utopia of multicultural dialogue. In his work “Un village sans frontiers”, Chen Zhen used 99 children’s chairs from different countries in the world, transforming them into small candle houses and displaying them together as a universal village. In China the candle symbolizes the life of an individual - and producing ‘houses’ on children’s chairs also has a particular significance: constructing a village without frontiers. It is up to us to begin, but our hopes are always carried forward to the next generation.

“The project offers a poetic vision but also raises more complex issues: equality, community, tolerance and mutual understanding, coexistence, a dialogue without frontiers.”

Chen Zhen, Un Village sans frontières, 2000, chair, candles, 54 x 33 x 25 cm, Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins

4. Contemporary artists often explore new art forms and experiment with artistic mediums, such as new media or digital art, and sound art.

GAGPROJECT, BOOTh J4

Juz Kitson, a trained young ceramicist on Sydney’s Central, creates objects of un-settling beauty. She works with a range of materials - including wax, latex, clay, alpaca wool, seaweed, horse and human hair and bone, creating sculptures and ceramic installations and so explores what she calls “uncomfortable territories”. 

human organs such as the heart and stomach are regular motifs in Kitson’s installation work. 

Juz Kitson, Changing Skin (detail), 2013, Jingdezhen porcelain and mixed media, 5.8 x 5 x 1.4 m, Courtesy of GAGPROJECT

GALERIE TANJA WAGNER, BOOTh A16

Annabel Daou was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and moved to New York in 1999.The language divorced of any meaning becomes an object, both threatening and useless…– Annabel Daou1 (Annabel Daou, unpublished artist’s statement, 2004.)

Annabel Daou, uses language and the written word as the basis of her drawings. By transliterating into Arabic historically significant texts, sentences or words that draw upon American history or Pop culture, she questions the very nature of language, communication and meaning, and provokes political and cultural reflection.

From where to where (2010) is a project that was completed over a period of two months spent between New York and Beirut—Daou’s first trip back to Lebanon after leaving her home country. It is composed out of the English and Arabic responses of strangers encountered during the travel to whom the questions were posed Where are you now? Where are you coming from? and Where are you going to? The title of the piece from where to where is a literal translation of an Arabic expression that idiomatically translates as “how dare you?” This question frames the work as an inquiry into the sense in which identity is asserted, undermined, and/or reconstructed through the ongoing exchange between location and state of mind.

This work was exhibited as the U.S. entry for the 12th Annual Cairo Biennale, which opened two weeks before the outbreak of the January Revolution. It remained at the Palace of Arts in Cairo throughout the uprising. During wartime, hotels often serve as a locale for journalists and people in transit to "wait out" violent or disruptive activity, much as this work was made to do. Insofar as this work was about attesting to Daou’s own presence during a journey from her present home to her past one, it's repeated refrain "I'm here, I'm here" unexpectedly came to echo the protestors of Tahrir Square, who were attesting, first and foremost, to their presence.

Annabel Daou, from where to where, 2010, Ink and repair tape on hand made paper, sound, 208 x 280 cm, Galerie Tanja Wagner

Annabel Daou, which side are you on -, 2012, SD video, colour, sound, TV- Grundi, 3-06 min., Galerie Tanja Wagner

Annabel Daou’s art work ‘Which Side are You On?’ (2012) features an old television, a still image, a tape recording of the artist asking the titular question ‘which side are you on?’, and a recording of people’s answers to that question. That’s it. It seems simple enough. But this work represents the doubts and desires of millions of young people today.Looking at the art work from a distance, it’s just a TV.

A massive white frame made from metal and plastic. Antennas. Chunky buttons. An analogue screen on which you can discern the individual colours if you come close enough. What makes the television looks even more quaint, is what it transmits. It doesn’t transmit moving images. It shows a still image.

As you come closer, you hear a tape recording of the artist asking various people the question ‘which side are you on?’ along with the answers the people have given. Some people take the question seriously, others think more lightly of it. But however serious or lightly the respondents take the question, and whatever their answer, you hear doubt in their voices. The question leaves the respondents with all the choice in the world.

The question demands a decision that few people today are willing to make. It is a decision many of us have been taught not to make: the decision to choose one thing over another (choose one ideology over another, not to value one truth more than another).

Daou’s draws attention to the double-bind that emerges when you are forced to intuitively choose a side, even, or perhaps rather especially, if you know that no one side is preferable over another per se. It seems to me that this double-bind is representative of the situation we are in today. The geopolitical, economic and ecological crises have forced a generation which was always said to have all the options in the world to choose a side, to take a stand.

It is fitting, then also, that the medium through which Daou transmits this double-bind is a television set that is out of date.. Similarly, it makes sense that the picture on display is reminiscent of both a mashrabiya and a confession screen. A mashrabiya is a window whose structure prevents outsiders from looking in whilst allowing insiders to look out. A confession screen is a screen that separates while simultaneously stimulating shared intimacy. To pick one side over others means to fully believe in something without being able to see it in its entirety; and it means to blindly share with others your intuition. It is self-evident that this is as enticing as it is dangerous, potentially disastrous even. Daou forces us to take a leap of faith that defies reason.

GALLERY ISABELLE VAN DEN EYNDE, BOOTh J16

:mentalKLINIK is an artist duo from Istanbul composed of Yasemin Baydar (*1972, İstanbul) and Birol Demir (*1967, Ankara) known for their reactionary form of an open laboratory to reinvent process, production, roles, conception and presentation. Resisting to the limitations of a single vocabulary or style, their world is a playful one full of hedonistic appeal which can be experienced as festive and glamourous but also surprising as one approaches to discover with a closer view an underlying violence suggestive of a bad trip after party or a creepy begining of the end.

Their works shift between emotional and robotic attitudes. Some works begin by slicing or cutting whereby the artists introduce an element of danger, as a métaphore of art. Other works are emotionally charged with connotations set in direct contrast to other works completely devoid of human characteristics. Converting all pieces of present time into materials for their works of art, :mentalKLINIK points out to contemporary reality by means of sound, action, object, text and form. Reflecting upon our habits of consumption and production; the artist duo forces the limits of interdisciplinary working and questions the patterns and the modes of relation underlying these patterns. The artists dislocate the materials already detached from everyday life and create a new aesthetic form that is awkward, alien and uncanny within the exhibition space.

:mentalKLINIK, FrenchKiss, 2013, Double French horn, Lacquered brass, 54 x 81 x 31 cm, Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van de Eynde

5. Contemporary art often deals with current political, social and cultural issues.

D GALLERIE, BOOTh J18

Mahardika (‘Diki’) Yudha is the Coordinator of Research Development at Forum Lenteng Jakarta, a collective of new media artists, and a member of the Video Art Development Division in Ruangrupa, an artists’ initiative based in Jakarta. he is also working as a facilitator for video workshops for Forum Lenteng. Most recently, Mahardika was appointed Art Director for the 2013 OK Video Festival, Indonesia’s most established and internationally recognised video art festival.

Mahardika held his first solo exhibition entitled Footage Jive at the ruangrupa Gallery in 2009. his artworks have been presented at many national and international film festivals and exhibitions including the Jakarta International Film Festival and the International Festival for Experimental Film, India. Mahardika has also been involved in several research projects, mainly in the field of Indonesian art history research. he has taken part in residencies including Periferry [1.0] in India and the JENESYS Programme 2011-2012 hosted by the Japan Foundation in Japan.

The Brahmaputra is the only river in India with a male name. Running through Nepal, China, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh, the river is a natural north/south divide in the country’s northeast. In a region of such cultural pluralism, with separatist hotspots, the river serves as a trade route and information channel. Set in a precarious, clandestine port in Assam, the work (the title means “the sound of Brahmaputra) creates a metaphor that associates passage from the rural north to urban south with the idea of developmentalism. 

Mahardhika Yudha, The Sound of Brahmaputra, 2010, Single channel video 3’ 45’, 720 x 576 PAL (4-3), artist , D Gallerie

GALLERY SKE, BOOTh A36

In “Memories of an old peeling wall”, Kher uses bindis to construct layers of patterns. Two layers are opposed - the first is closed, almost grid-like and repetitive implying a code that conceals information, the second, an organic form reminiscent of peeling paint. The work could be read as a commentary on the arbitrary nature of memories or the past that adds a layer of complexity to the seeming order of the present.

Bharti Kher, Memories of an old peeling wall, 2013, Bindis on painted board, 244 x 183 cm, Bharti Kher Studio and GALLERYSKE

6. Contemporary art often revisits and reworks traditional myths and folklore to explore contemporary issues.

KALFAYAN GALLERIES, BOOTh A34

Raed Yassin was born in Beirut in 1979. he graduated from the Theatre Department of the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003. An artist and musician, Yassin’s work often originates from an examination of his personal narratives and their position within a collective history, through the lens of consumer culture and mass production.

According to independent curator and critic Nat Muller, “Raed Yassin literally, and mechanically, reproduces the visual fabric of his childhood memories in a series of embroideries in Dancing, Smoking, Kissing. he takes the viewer on a pictorial walk down memory lane by threading together the mental images of his childhood with their disappeared photographic representations. We are all familiar with family photo albums and how they look and feel. They are universal, yet private, mementos that document sometimes big, but mostly small and mundane instances of family togetherness. Most of Yassin’s family photographs were lost over time through incessant moving, displacement, and in other ways. What remains of these lost images is not only the memory of the event, such as a birthday or dress-up party, a picnic at the beach, a kiss in a nightclub, a holiday abroad, but also the memory of the actual photographs that chronicled family life. Born into a family of tailors Yassin sets out to reconstruct these disappeared and abandoned images on computer-embroidered textiles that incorporate his own recollection, those of family members, and the leaps and gaps of his imagination.

Colourful, intimate and ornamental these embroideries simultaneously emit a sensibility of domesticity while also retaining a mass-produced and mechanised feel, which to an extent dilutes the highly personal element of the project. In Dancing, Smoking, Kissing Yassin never succeeds in fully reconstructing or retrieving the original image, if there ever was one to start with, instead he provides us with the stitched material rendition of memory.”

Raed Yassin, Family portrait with peacock (“Da, 2013, 90 x 110 cm, silk thread emroidery on embroidere, Courtesy of Kalfayan Galleries

IN SITU / FABIENNE LECLERC, BOOTh A18

Damien Deroubaix (born 1972 in Lille, France, lives and works in Berlin) is presenting works in woodcuts alongside etchings and drawings. With its various references to the history of art and popular culture, the work of the young French painter and sculptor bears witness to an ongoing interest in the symbolic language of death, which he combines with the vernacular of advertisement, music and finance to take a both critical and ironic look at contemporary society.

Drawing on the iconography that characterises his paintings and watercolours on paper, Deroubaix’s engravings take the shape of large wooden panels adorned with a series of found objects – a tyre, ram skulls, hair, vine shoots… – acting as so many reminders of reality.

The image of Death summoning individuals from all walks of life to their grave first appeared in late medieval Western Europe as a response to the devastations caused by the plague and has inspired generations of artists throughout history, as witness for instance the works of hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel and Albrecht Dürer. In Deroubaix’s work, the plague is substituted with the ills of contemporary society, whose imminent collapse is announced by “Gott mit uns” (God with us, 2011) and “World Downfall 2” (2009), the two woodcuts that conclude the show.

Forêt, 2014, Watercolor, ink, acrylic and collage on paper, 150 x 200 cm, Unique piece, Courtesy the artist & Galerie In Situ / Fabienne Leclerc, Paris

7. Contemporary art often appropriates from art history and other cultural landmarks.AppropriationContemporary artists, like many artists that preceded them, may acknowledge and find inspiration in art works from previous time periods in both subject matter and formal elements. sometimes this inspiration takes the form of appropriation. 

GREEN ART GALLERY, BOOTh A21

Kamrooz Aram’s diverse practice often engages the complicated relationship between traditional non-Western art and Western Modernism. Through a variety of forms including painting, collage, drawing and installation, Aram has found the potential for image-making to function critically in its use as a tool for a certain renegotiation of history.

Kamrooz Aram fuses the decorative elements of Persian carpets and miniatures with Western modernism in paintings that borrow from a wide range of sources. his paintings reveal the essential role that ornament played in the development of Modern art in the West. Taking floral

motifs from Persian carpets, Aram repeatedly reconfigures them into painterly mediations, building the pattern, destroying it and rebuilding again, resulting in explosive images, always in a state of flux. These lush canvases form repetitive patterns that coax new meaning from the chaos of fragments. Aram complicates the relationship between ornament and decoration, revealing the history of ornament as a drive towards the absence of figuration, a movement towards abstraction.

“I’m interested in what makes something Eastern, what makes something exotic,” Aram has said. Born in Iran and raised there until the age of 8, when his family moved to the United States, Aram was heavily influenced by Edward Said’s seminal book  Orientalism  (1978) and by the Iranian revolution. his mixed-media collages and paintings are populated with his own stylized vocabulary of floral motifs, starbursts, geometry, and religious and nationalistic iconography: hawks, angels, and imams. In Aram’s compositions, Eastern and Western art histories butt up against one another, challenging traditional preconceptions and proposing new relationships. In his work the artist makes reference to the works of the iconic post-war American artists Cy Twombly and Frank Stella.

Kamrooz Aram, Untitled (Palimp-sest), 2013, Oil, charcoal and oil crayon on can, 213 x 183 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Green Art

ChATTERJEE & LAL / ChEMOUDL PRESCOTT ROAD, BOOTh J6

The art of Rashid Rana has diverse origins and manifests in multiple expressions. Rana is making a connection with the history of art but more than that with the history of ideas. The digital prints deal with the duplicity of our existence — disjointed on surface but in reality connected through many cords. It is not easy to differentiate between regions, religions, races and reasons involved in creating a range of cultural artifacts.

In essence, his entire body of work operates on the premise of conveying a sense of our reality which is painful yet unavoidable. So the basic and mundane characteristics of our existence acquire a contextual framework, mostly from the past; consequently, the immediate and familiar incidents from the present assume new meaning, justification and interpretation. The craft of digging up another side to the usual and the common and investigating its causes and connections in history is for many the real task of the artist. That is how one is able to form a comprehensive picture of the transient reality as well as locate one’s own role and position in the larger scheme of things.

Perhaps with this view in mind, if one looks at the work  War Within, one is aware of its origin in the ‘Oath of the horatii’  (1786) by Jacques Louis-David but discovers that the bigger image is also based upon a motorcycle explosion with flames from a news photograph in recent times. Thus, the artist brings together the aesthetics of the two periods. Along with the common content, the terror or war, it is the ‘picturesque’ quality of both visuals that entices a spectator. Even if one recognises the sad picture, the pleasure of seeing colours and tones, distributed in an order that excites the eye, reaffirms the power of art. This is an important endeavour in a situation where power has become the sole language.

The technique of image-making for these works from Rana is not just a formal device; the act of breaking large pictures into tiny pixels and then combining them to make another image is a comment upon our fragmented and deconstructed surroundings. We are condemned to survive in a fractioned and fractured world, not much different from the surfaces of Rashid Rana.

Rashid Rana, War Within, 2013, C Print + DIASEC, 330 x 200 cm, Courtesy of Chemould Prescott Road

Educational guideDesigner: Moylin YuanEditors: Bettina Klein

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