The past decade has seen a concerted effort to modernize a national art history narrative for the United Arab Emirates. It started, as these things tend to do, with men – with Hassan Sharif and other members of the Emirati avant-garde of the 1980s and 1990s, nicknamed The Five. It was only in recent years – in a belated fix to the fix – that consideration turned to women who were their contemporaries but who received far less attention. Chief among them is Nujoom Alghanem, who in 2019 became the first woman to represent the country at the Venice Biennale. She is known for her meditative films that sensitively unfold the textures and timbres of Emirati life, and is considered one of the most important national poetesses, particularly in her then-radical experiments with prose poetry and verse. free from the 1980s. This retrospective, “Unframed,” brought together nearly three decades of his rarely seen paintings, along with a new series of photographs – film stills covered in lines of poetry. These works of an attractive sweetness reminded us of the two sources of his fame.
It turns out that Alghanem is not a great painter, but the show was still remarkably convincing. His narrative films and documentaries are mostly character driven. Most often they focus on women as both subject and protagonist, as in sky nearby (2014), her portrayal of the first female Emirati camel herder to compete in beauty pageants and camel races, showing the challenges she faces in a male-dominated industry. Throughout Alghanem’s cinematic oeuvre, there is a sense of the passing of the torch, of the last men and pioneering women. Another of these women is the nearly ninety-year-old Bedouin healer Hamama (2010). But the lovingly photographed landscape is also ever-present as a silent but somehow eloquent figure; in the mostly unpopulated paintings of Alghanem he comes to the fore.
Rather than being presented chronologically, “Unframed” proceeded chromatically, with yellowish browns giving way to gray blues in a series of maritime scenes, followed by the reds and yellows of streaked car headlights in new works. which depict Dubai in the rain. The first works presented date from the mid-1990s, when Alghanem left a career in journalism to study cinema in Ohio. She experienced autumn for the first time; the small canvases in mixed techniques from this period are studies in russet and ocher. Some, like the mantis head A man from Mars And Spirits of Mars, both from 1995, in which shadowy figures seem to dance around a fire – incorporate scraps of rough burlap to suggest figuration. Their titles reflect a fascination with both animist beliefs and the wave of Mars landings that were happening at the time. Others, like The actress in this scene1994, and Garden spirits, California. 2001–2002, use jute yarn to trace the outlines of the bodies, like a Photoshop Find Edges fibrous filter.
Emirati artists of Alghanem’s generation were preoccupied with the rapid transformation of their country. His paintings also convey a sense of existing in an interstitial no-man’s land, between a rapidly vanishing history and a future that threatens to crush the traditional ways of being that drive films such as The sounds of the sea (2014), which recounts the final voyage of a renowned performer of sea shanties, or Between two shores (1999), about the last remaining boatman rowing the traditional ferry across Dubai Creek. It is encapsulated in Between two shores2022-2023, a large painting of eight spectral figures hovering over the stream, apparently in a barzakhor limbo, between the past and the endless present.
