Ten artists from across the Gulf have been nominated for the second Richard Mille Art Prize. The complete list is available here.
The artists’ works are exhibited at Louvre Abu Dhabi until March 19 and the winner will be announced on March 20.
“A wall is a witness”, says Vikram Divecha. The Beirut-born, Mumbai-raised artist, who works in both New York and Abu Dhabi, has created an ambitious proposal: a museum of walls. Its model, Wall House, shows a space 500m long, possibly inside a warehouse, with 300 walls salvaged from demolished buildings around the world. “It’s almost like a walk through a timeline of contemporary civilization,” he says.
Only one wall has been saved so far, which required the complex coordination of metal fabricators, safety engineers, concrete cutters and forklift operators to extract it and prepare it for use. exhibition (it was too big to fit in the Louvre, unfortunately). Divecha’s request to delay the demolition of an ordinary two-storey residential building in Abu Dhabi baffled the municipality, which offered to show him how to create a new wall for display.
Most likely built in the 1980s, the building wasn’t old enough or unique enough to be considered architecturally significant, but that’s exactly why it was worth saving. “For me it is a living fragment of the United Arab Emirates. I am trying to make a cultural object from a material that we will [throw away and] forget.” The inner side of the wall is “incredibly beautiful, almost like a color field painting.” Posters of valleys and mountains in Pakistan stuck to the wall give clues to the lives of the ancient inhabitants.
A close up of Vikram Divecha Wall House (2022)
Photo: Augustine Paredes – Seeing things. Courtesy of Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi. Artwork © the artist
Divecha works with what he calls “found processes,” where he introduces a problem into the day-to-day operations of a city or organization. In 2016, he remapped the routes of street cleaners in Sharjah to drop off their rubbish in front of the art museum, examining the relationship between art and waste. A year later, he delayed a Paris-Rouen train for five minutes to create a break in our relationship to time. In 2018, he took a panel from Frieze New York’s tent and exhibited it as a minimalist art object in a nearby gallery before returning it.
With one wall collected and hundreds more to go, Divecha’s project is ambitious but he hopes it will draw attention to what is being erased to make way for the UAE’s rapid growth.
