Exhibition and Event
Love | Labour | Leisure is an interdisciplinary project that delves into the ethos of migrant communities in the UAE by reflecting on context, capital and cultural life. Through the lenses of art, performance and music, alternate ways of looking and mapping are presented, from wide-ranging aerial views to forensic, facial close-ups.
Artists: Amirah Tajdin, Anahita Razmi, Augustine Paredes, Eisa Jocson, Mohamed Somji, Saba Qizilbash, Riyas Komu, Vikram Divecha. Music program courtesy of Nadia Says, Mehdi Ansari, WYWY. Programmed by Nadine Khalil.
Free entry, registration required under Splashthat
View the online exhibition here
Program
6:00 pm Exhibition, reception, mingling
7:00 – 8:00 pm Labor’s Love Lost
A conversation between artist Vikram Divecha and curator Murtaza Vali on the politics of the gaze, portraiture and artistic labor.
Jumping off from Divecha’s 2016 project Portrait Sessions, this conversation with critic and curator
Murtaza Vali—who has been in dialogue and has collaborated with the artist for almost a decade—will discuss the relationship and exchange between art and other types of work in the UAE. Questions will include: How does one make art about labor in the Gulf? What are some of the strategies one might use to address the conditions of labor without further exploitation? Does the frame of art facilitate or hinder a conversation about labor? How is art work different from other types of work in the region? Is solidarity among workers across different economic sectors simply a utopian ideal?
© Courtesy National Pavilion UAE
Beirut-born and Mumbai-bred,
Vikram Divecha is an artist based in Dubai. His practice raises questions about time, value, and authorship by engaging people across urban and social spheres, and working with available material and space. Divecha terms this approach “found processes”, which often sees him intervene within public and social systems. From wholesale exporters to municipal gardeners, architectural consultants to railway traffic managers, Divecha’s participants inform and shape his projects in various ways, in some cases for sustained durations. These attempts translate into public art, site-specific interventions, workshops, installations, moving images, paintings, surfaces, drawings, photographs, performances, and text. Divecha holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and was a participant in the Museum’s Independent Study Program. Divecha’s works have been exhibited in various institutions, including Jameel Arts Center, Dubai (2019); The Jewish Museum, NY (2019); Wallach Art Gallery, NY (2019); 57th Venice Biennale (2017); 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017); Abu Dhabi (2017); Centre for Art, Warsaw (2015). Vikram Divecha is represented by Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai.
Murtaza Vali is a critic, curator, and art historian. His ongoing research interests include materialist art histories, ex-centric minimalisms, ghosts, and other figures of liminal subjectivities and repressed histories, the weight of color and contemporary art of the Indian Ocean littoral. Past curatorial projects include Crude, Jameel Art Centre, Dubai (2018–2019); Mohammed Kazem: Ways of Marking, Aicon Gallery, New York (2018); Vikram Divecha: Minor Work; Gallery IVDE, Dubai (2017); Accented, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah (2015), Geometries of Difference: New Approaches to Abstraction and Ornament, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York (2015); and Brute Ornament: Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah, Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2012). His long-form publications include: A ‘Real Allegory’ of Manual Labor in the Age of Global Capital, published in di’van|A Journal of Accounts, Sydney (2020), and Lost Horizons: Revisiting CAMP’s Indian Ocean Projects in the forthcoming book accompanying March Meeting 2021, Sharjah Art Foundation. Vali earned an MA in Art History and Archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (2004). Born in 1974 in Sharjah, he currently lives and works between Sharjah and Brooklyn.
8:00 – 9:00 pm Performance by Augustine Paredes and anna bernice
Augustine Paredes and Anna Bernice are co-founders of Sa Tahanan Co. Augustine Paredes’ Slouching through Bedspaces is a series of photographs that recounts his migration from the Philippines to the UAE as an introspective journey to find a home or homes. In his new book Long Night Stands with Lonely, Lonely Boys he reminisces on the pain of growing and going. In response to a photograph entitled How to Slouch When Sleeping, poet and curator Anna Bernice will read a poem on loss and intimacy, entitled To Make a Home in a Stranger’s Bed.
© Augustine Paredes
Augustine Paredes is a Filipino artist and photographer based in Dubai. Augustine’s lyrical, contemporary, and sensuous visual narratives are derived from his many-storied travels, South East Asian consciousness, and queer gaze. He is an alumnus of Campus Art Dubai and the International Summer School of Photography, and has been nominated for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. He has been exhibited in the Philippines, Malaysia, Latvia, Australia, and other countries.
Bernice is a Filipina multi-disciplinary performance artist, freelance creative consultant, and arts/culture researcher. She has a double B.A. in Theater and Social Research & Public Policy with a focus on Art History from New York University Abu Dhabi, also receiving training at the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute in NYC. Her emerging career has taken her to Berlin, New York, and Prague to collaborate and work with various companies in arts, culture, and social impact.
9:00 – 9:30 pm Spaces of Work and Spaces of Play
Guided tour and conversation by and with the artist Mohamed Somji
Dubai and Dusk and Dawn by Mohamed Somji is a photography series that zeroes in on the use of green and public space by migrant communities. These are communal spaces of gathering, leisure, dance, and sports. They are also improvisational spaces like empty parking lots or patches of land where different communities mingle, rest, worship, and make TikTok videos. Somji will be in conversation with Fareed Majari about the social documentary vein of his practice and how it started.
© Mohamed Somji
Mohamed Somji is the Director of Gulf Photo Plus (GPP), a Dubai-based gallery and community organization that has been cultivating visual practices in photography in the UAE and across the wider MENASA region since 2004. As part of GPP’s commitment to developing visual and critical literacy, the organization engages the community with regular educational and art programming, and for a number of years hosted an annual photography festival that draws international attendance and showcases the world’s preeminent talent in photography. Mohamed is a co-curator of the bi-annual BredaPhoto Festival in the Netherlands, and has served as a jury member for various visual arts initiatives, notably the prestigious Arab Documentary Photography Program. Mohamed’s pedagogical expertise is broad, from teaching varied photography workshops and designing photo walk experiences across the UAE, to conducting portfolio reviews for Canon’s Student Development program, and leading a capacity building mentorship program for students in the Emirates with Warehouse421, a multidisciplinary arts organization based in Abu Dhabi. Mohamed’s documentary photography practice locates and probes schisms in contemporary life, challenging the status quo with sensitive, critical commentary on the politics of representation.
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