calendario eventi  :: 

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16/3/2014

Two exhibitions

Cuadro Fine Art Gallery, Dubai

Crash | Manal AlDowayan
March 17th 2014 to April 6th 2014

Alarming numbers of Saudi female teachers are injured or die in car accidents every year. For these women, the combination of low pay, a ban on driving, far flung teaching assignments and unsafe roads and drivers, has created a highly dangerous and unstable situation. In her latest research-based artwork, Crash, Manal AlDowayan asks the viewer, “Why don’t you see this?”

These accidents are regularly reported in Saudi newspapers, yet there is no trace of the women’s identities. Their faces are never seen and their names are not mentioned. The repetition of crash reportage of anonymous victims yields numbness towards the subject, ultimately fuelling “active forgetting.” The artist asks, “How do you mourn if the suffering have no face or name?”

Information on the crashes - newspaper clippings and data analysis - fills the space. Tweets from the women prior to the accidents are also displayed, bridging the divide between data presentation and posthumous contributions to the work. The artist thus records the physical and the emotional impact of these tragedies, making them both tangible.

Manal AlDowayan’s presentation places her within the global dialogue on the idea of research as artistic practice. Research is integral to her body of work, usually informing the process through which she understands her subject. In Crash, the research process goes further to become the work itself, challenging conventional definitions of what an art object can be.

Perhaps only through the re-visualization of these tragedies can their devastating implications be fully understood. AlDowayan’s utilitarian presentation, stripped of the aesthetics often associated with works of art, matter-of-factly displays her subject. She utilizes common road maps to triangulate three data points – the location of the teachers’ homes, the schools to which they were assigned, and the crash sites. These points are memorialized pragmatically, rather than ceremoniously, using simple pins. Ironically, this provides the viewer a more humane recounting of these events than the media articles dedicated to the subject.

The impact of traumatic images presented by the media is often times dulled by senseless repetition and therefore rendered banal to the average viewer. Manal AlDowayan attempts to reframe the journalistic image as an artwork, thereby isolating it from the numbness brought about by repeated viewing.

The artist employs the silkscreen technique to create her prints, eerily echoing the reproduction capability of a printing press. These images, a small sample taken from hundreds of newspaper clippings, are as abstract as our perception of these tragic deaths. The subject is not immediately clear and the vagueness invites quiet contemplation and reflection.

Manal AlDowayan presents a visual journey that attempts to spans the gap between overwhelming clutter of data to an utter absence of recognizable form, prompting viewers – no longer satisfied with an anonymous image - to seek out information where there is none.

“As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. ”

― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

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The Residency at Cuadro | Faig Ahmed & Olivia Arthur
March 17th 2014 to April 6th 2014

The Residency at Cuadro operates in partnership with Fairmont The Palm, Dubai. It is a three-month program, offering a select group of local and international artists accommodation and studio space in which to expand their practice. Cuadro works closely with the artists to meet their creative and professional needs, providing career mentorship and exhibition opportunities.

Faig Ahmed (b. 1982 Baku, Azerbaijan)
Artist-in-Residency - January, 2014
Faig Ahmed has continued his reinterpretation of traditional Azerbaijani rugs while in residency. In an attempt to disassemble the carpets’ conventional structure the artist superimposes digital patterns onto traditional composition. These combinations create rugs with bold optical illusions or transform the carpets into unconventional sculptural forms.
Faig Ahmed graduated from the Sculpture faculty at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in Baku in 2004. He was chosen to represent Azerbaijan inaugural pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and again at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2013. The Victoria and Albert Museum shortlisted Ahmed for the 3rd Jameel Prize in 2013.

Olivia Arthur (b. 1980 London, England)
Artist-in-Residency October, 2013
Olivia Arthur marries a real-life tragedy with a fictitious narrative to uniquely highlight the effects of Dubai’s rapid evolution on the everyday lives of the city’s residents.
Inspired by the story of the MV Dara, a ship that sank near the Dubai port in 1961, Arthur imagined a survivor of the incident making the journey back to Dubai more than fifty years later. During her residency, the artist captured a series of images cataloguing Dubai’s industrial arm domesticating the desert and sea from the perspective of a castaway who has lived at the mercy of those natural elements.
Olivia Arthur received a degree in mathematics from Oxford University in 2002, a diploma in photojournalism from the London College of Printing in 2003 and a scholarship from Fabrica in 2006. In 2008 she joined Magnum photos as a nominee and became an associate in 2011. She has received numerous awards including the Vic Odden Award, Royal Photographic Society in 2010 and Laureate Photographe, Foundation Jean-Luc Lagardere, Paris in 2008.

Image: Manal AlDowayan | Crash II

Cuadro Fine Art Gallery
Gate VIllage 10, DIFC, Sheikh Zayed Road, Trade Center 2, Dubai, UAE
Opening Times
Sunday-Thursday 10:00 Am - 8:00 Pm
Saturday 12:00 Pm-6:00 Pm
Or by appointment

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