At last week's Art Dubai -- the UAE's answer to Miami's Art Basel -- government censors played a larger than expected role in policing the display of contemporary art. While researching my next thriller novel, I dropped by the four day festival at the Jumeirah Beach Resort. The festival was meant to display the United Arab Emirates as an emerging force in yet another market: the contemporary art world. But as various gallerists were asked to remove certain pieces of work at the opening on Tuesday night, minutes before the arrival of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Maktoum, there was a crack in the city's western veneer, an ominous thundercloud of political censorship out of Dubai's clear desert sky.
As museums like the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Gugenheim prepare to break ground (and world records) for their size on nearby Saayidat Island, this sudden rash of censorship fit a discernible trend.
Here are three examples: Sarah Rohbah, an Iranian American artist currently living in New York, used an American flag as a canvas backdrop to draw two characters - Persia's mythical equivalent of Romeo and Juliet-- alongside a line in Farsi referring to Messianic redemption. According to gallerist Kourosh Nourish, the organizers were "amicable" in asking him to remove it, claiming that they wanted to steer clear of possible defacement of American images.
Moataz Nasr had also intended to display a work of fabric, one depicting a jet plane flying over an explosion. Superimposed on the image were the words, in Arabic, that appear on the fliers dropped by American planes before premeditated bombings: "If you ignore this warning you will be destroyed. Will this be your fate?" When I asked to see the censored work, I was taken into a backroom behind the booth to see it hanging behind the door.
Finally, even before the opening, the daily local art magazine, Canvas, had felt the censor's black felt tip. Staff members were asked to conceal Ramin Haerizadeh's work, Untitled, which portrayed children in a classroom listening to Empress Pahlavi as they chewed on crumpled papers displaying her image.
Provocation is precisely what creates the demand for contemporary art. Take the provocation away and Art Dubai is yet another empty show of supply, another glitzy glass skyscraper built for its own sake, barren of humanity.
Daniel Levin is the author of the bestselling The Last Ember (Riverhead Books, trade paperback, May 4, 2010).
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Canvas is a bi-monthly art magazine that covers art and culture from the Middle East and Arab world www.canvasonline.com. We published a daily newspaper during the Art Dubai Fair (not a festival).
I would also like to point out the spelling of the following names is Sara Rahbar and her gallerist Kouroush Nouri. Furthermore, it is Saadiyat Island not Saayidat. Finally, I must say, reading your closing paragraph I find this rather flippant observation to be entirely untrue. Censorship or no censorship the region has a thriving art scene as evidenced in the buzzing attendance in the form of art collectors, patrons, museum reps and the general public. We would be happy to help with any future Middle Eastern art related queries.
Censorship and far more serious restrictions are routinely practiced by the self-styled “only democracy in the Middle East,” i.e. Israel against Palestinians. I wonder if Mr. Levin would find violations of Palestinian human rights by Israel compelling enough to speak against them? For example, what does Mr. Levin think of the Israeli systematic campaign last year to ban all cultural activities organized by Palestinians as part of the “Jerusalem the Capital of Arab Culture 2009” festival? Here is one example:
“Israeli police shut down a Palestinian theatre in East Jerusalem on Thursday, forcing foreign writers taking part in an international literature festival to move elsewhere for the second time in a week.” Haaretz, 29 May, 2009.
Now, which is more worthy of criticism, censoring some paintings in an art fair in Dubai, or blocking Arab Jerusalemites from celebrating their own culture and city?
Art here is one more pretty jewel in a crown, inert and no more than a gimcrack publicity device, to BUY cultural status.
An actual art community is not just about parties, it includes educated people in positions of power that would welcome art about the variety of goings-on in the local sphere—economic progress, identity issues(plenty of that there), slave labor, human rights violations—and the need for a space to affect dialogue about it. This spectacle however, is yet another display of purchase power, conducted within a very controlled environment for discourse. Basically another tired event for a class of fatted dilettantes who'd like to say they went to an art show, you know...one with western people and nice outfits.
So Slotbadger can spare me the spin on "enthusiasm and passion". The parties, tallest buildings and biggest this-or-that—try showing art about how these things are done on the backs of the expatriate workers that gets paid $400 a month to work in 130ºF heat in the summer months. Then perhaps one can take it all a little more seriously.
To most of the people who work here in the fast-growing public and private art sectors in the region, the rather black-and-white approach that snipes at "His Highnesses' Censors" ignores the vast shades of grey that exist in between. The attitudes of the authorities are changing. But these things take time.
The mentality here is simply to concentrate elsewhere, away from political and sexual content. This is simply a fact of life in this part of the world.
But art has made a real difference in this city. There is, with events such as Art Dubai and the city's fellow fair, the fringe Bastikia Art Fair, a new incentive for local artists and art professionals to get cracking. Add to this, the sustained efforts of artists, gallerists, dealers, collectors, private and corporate investors, government policy, have coalesced into a scenario where the stage is set for Dubai's much-maligned reputation to perhaps get a reassessment.