The Imperfect Chronology: Mapping the Contemporary II group exhibition is on at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, opening August 23 and running to January 8.
The works are drawn from the Barjeel Art Foundationcollection of modern and contemporary Arab art, and the final display of a year-long series at the Whitechapel will focus on the theme of what the press release calls ‘mapping geographies’ which examines “the notion of statehood and exploring how artists engage with the rapidly expanding cities of the Arab region.”
LISTE, Art Basel’s sister, home of emerging artists’ art fair is on in the medieval Swiss town, running June 14 to 19.
This year’s event sees a whole host of exciting names presented by their respective international galleries, with some artists coming together for the first time, giving forth their work in in-booth collaborations.
L’air du temps (French for ‘the current trend’) is an immersive video installation that consists a “roving shot across a recently purchased and renovated hotel particulier in Paris”, probing the tenuous relationships and potential symbiosis of “comingling colonial forces” in a series of digital interventions and interactions that are “mutualistic or antagonistic in nature”.
“It’s not really about oil running out, it’s about oil becoming worthless again”, says Monira Al Qadiriin the second instalment (see here for the first) in a pilot series, titled Money Makes the World Go‘Round, produced in partnership with arts digital production unit Video in Common (ViC). The Beirut-based artist explores history as construction in a contemporary milieu of global capital and linguistic imperialism. In an age of networked communication, driven by the internet, the role of the English language and corporate branding becomes central to economic development and rapid cultural change in regions like the Middle East.
“It’s this conflation between corporate culture and the state”, adds Al Qadiri about the practice of art collective GCC (taking its name from the economic and political union Gulf Cooperation Council) of which she’s a member. With her solo work, Al Qadiri goes further in examining the homogenising effects of economic language and communication networks, beyond global politics and business, to national identity and even religion.
Art and economics is central to the Money Makes the World Go ‘Round series –exploring art and artists in a global market –to publish at the start of every week from the last day of March to June, 2015. It features six artists from cities around the networked world. **
To write an account of FIAC is to attempt to speak of parts within a necessarily unknowable whole. Were the whole visible from one’s perspective on street level, no doubt it would be truly terrifying. Thankfully, we’re not obliged to be all-seeing, in fact perhaps even the organisers would advise against it. La Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris designates a four-day event whose object is art, galleries and exhibitions of a sort. Yet when someone says ‘FIAC’ (fyak!), they tend to mean something much more englobing even than the majestic Grand Palais that houses the main stands.
This year, FIAC introduced (OFF)ICIELLE, the ‘official satellite’ fair, whose purported purpose is to “showcase new territories: young galleries and newcomers to the international art scene; emerging artists and those whose historic contribution has been overlooked”. It was noted by more than once that, in actuality, the (OFF) – held in the less grandiose, more utilitarian venue Les Docks – Cité de la Mode et du Design – was a veritable salon des refusés. Which is to say it housed those galleries which applied for the main event but, for whatever reason, didn’t make the cut, suggesting that FIAC had cleverly maneuvered a cash cow on the back of younger, less established clients. That cynicism aside, (OFF) hosted some great galleries and artists, and its energy was slightly more welcoming, less high-maintenance than its older sister.
House of Gaga installation view. FIAC 2014. Courtesy the gallery.
It’s worth mentioning, though there’s no space to go into detail, that besides these ‘official’ fairs there was also the fourth annual Young International Artists (YIA) art fair, held at the Carreau du Temple in the Marais. Which, thanks to the appearance of FIAC’s (OFF), became a sort of off-off. Here, works by USA-based Jon Bernad and French artists Loup Sarion and Eva Barto at La GAD (Marseille) were a highlight, as was Barcelona’s The Green Parrot. Each of the three fairs had outdoor or hors les murs projects, as well. There were many, many openings at galleries in Paris during FIAC week, including a great solo show by Latvian artist Daiga Grantina at Galerie Joseph Tang (she also appeared in Tang’s (OFF) booth, accompanied by Adam Cruces, Jo-ey Tang and others). And the ‘Gallery Night’ on Thursday 23 October saw spaces throughout the city opening until 10pm. Everyone makes an attempt to get a piece of FIAC pie, it seems, for you never know when a collector might just swan past and fall madly deeply for one of your stable.
Even the day of rest, Sunday, saw the Belleville Galleries’ Brunch, where the array of young-ish spaces based in Paris’ Belleville quarter opened their doors. For someone who went expecting sweet patisseries and Nutella, the brunch itself was disappointedly meagre, however. Seemingly, everyone was hungover and would rather have been in bed. The Friday had seen the Ricard Foundation’s announcement of their annual art prize at the infamous bal jaune (yellow ball, named after the family’s eponymous pastis, one can only assume). More occasion for what became somewhat of a constant for many people from Tuesday’s (OFF) vernissage onward: drunkenness. Curatorial collective castillo/corrales curated the Prix Ricard show this year, with a fine selection of French artists including Mélanie Matranga, Audrey Cottin and Jean-Alain Corre. The winner was Camille Blatrix.
Laure Prouvost, ‘Wantee’ (2013). Courtesy MOT International.
In addition to all this folly, FIAC had organised substantial parallel programs of films, performances and conversations. The latter were conceived and orchestrated by Paris-based artist Alex Cecchetti under the title ‘Voices of Urgency’, with the final conversation event consisting of New York-based poet Ariana Reines, Paris-based sociolinguist Luca Greco and Slovenian poet Peter Semolič, reading around the topic of ‘desire and revolution’. Earlier that day, Laure Prouvost had given the performance titled ‘Bread, Tunnel, Vegetable’ (2014), which involved a group of children offering tea, bum-shaped cakes, and crisps to the audience sat on the floor, while the London-based French artist dramatically recounted stories associated with her imaginary lost granddad. The performance falls within the expansive Turner Prize-winning project, ‘Wantee’ (2013), the video of which was shown on a laptop monitor during the performance.
Berlin-based artists Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz showed two videos within the films program, ‘To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation’ (2013) and ‘Opaque’ (2014), a film so recently finished that Boudry and Lorenz had not yet seen it projected. A discussion between the artists and French art historian Élisabeth Lebovici followed each film, with some of the primary concerns being non-hierarchical production (in film, and in Pauline Oliveros’ music), the camera as active participant in a performance that couldn’t exist without it, and opacity as resistance against the aggressive act of understanding. The veil is a recurring motif; the artists suggest we don’t need to see everything and it is misguided to think the camera reveals all.
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, ‘Opaque’ (2014). Video still. Courtesy Ellen de Bruijne Projects.
If only one didn’t feel the pressure to see it all! At the main event, expensively-dressed people shuffle around with glazed eyes, darting between 750,000€ Isa Genzkens, 9€ sandwiches resembling plastic, and Ruinart champagne. The most interesting booths were ones that pretended to be anything else but a luxury goods stall. Particularly successful were those who allowed one single artist to create a total installation, not only because it gave a more generous insight into the practice, but also because it was such a relief after the endless white. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two Berlin galleries were among the most adept at this technique. Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie’s Wu Tsang installation came directly from the artist’s solo show, A day in the life of bliss, held at the gallery this summer. One of the highlights of the season, they cleverly re-contextualised the work for an FIAC audience, turning the stand into a mirror-like infinity lounge and inviting people to sit and observe reflections of themselves and others – and of course the colourful flashing light sculpture which took prime position in the centre, hanging from above and almost touching the floor.
Meanwhile upstairs, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler’s GCC installation included the HD video ‘Co-Op’ (2014), which ironically promotes a society based on luxury. The flat screen is installed within ‘Royal Mirage’ (2014), where wallpaper depicting the luxurious interior of a multi-billion dollar hotel in the Gulf serves as the background to eight painted portraits, hung in an even line. GCC commissioned a Thai painter in Kuwait to create oil paintings of members of the collective in the same style he paints sheikhs. Depicted in thawb and in a typical soft-focus manner, signs of age or gender become indiscernible, and all eight artists fall under the category of ‘Arab’. Simultaneously a witty comment on the kinds of portraiture Western collectors might hang on their walls, the rising power of the Middle East, and the role of the artist as self-promoting brand, GCC really made the mirage work.
Other galleries went for the classic mixed-bag group show model, which inevitably meant the works on display ranged from the merely eye-catching to the quietly stunning, with little way of discerning the two, unless you mustered up enough energy to speak to one of the exhausted looking gallerists. Some gems among the Kapoors included French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s dancing pyjamas encased in glass sheets, ‘Live Through That ?!’ (2014), at Kamel Mennour, London-based Eloise Hawser’s two pieces at Balice Hertling, young Romanian Mihuț Boșcu Kafchin at Gaudel de Stampa, Praz-Delavallade’s swathe of LA artists including Amanda Ross-Ho and photographer Matthew Brandt, and Galerie Antoine Levi’s display of Italian artist Francesco Gennari’s spiderweb photographs and US-American Sean Townley’s sculptures.
In addition to all these Paris galleries, highlights from abroad included Mexico D.F.’s House of Gaga, whose pairing of New York-based Sam Pulitzer’s drawings and Mexican illustrator Julio Ruelas, who died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1907, made a link that gave a touch of much-appreciated sentimentality. Unexpectedly seductive, German artist Martin Eder’s painting at Leipzig/Berlin Galerie EIGEN + ART also spoke to the romantics amongst us, while New York’s On Stellar Rays had a wild display of Debo Eilers’ and Rochelle Feinstein’s colourful painting and sculptural works. Austrian-born artist Josef Strau’s tacky fence piece was a highlight at London’s Vilma Gold, and the Latin American stars Adrián Villar Rojas, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Gabriel Kuri at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, were predictably impressive. Meanwhile, Lisbon’s Vera Cortês Art Agency presented artists Joana Escoval and Daniel Gustav Cramer, whose understated pieces provided relief from the bombastic, ostentatious norm.
Joana Escoval, ‘Outlaws in Language and Destiny’. Courtesy Vera Cortês Art Agency.
That’s a tiny, we’ll say refined, taste of FIAC before one even begins to rattle off some of the things to be seen at (OFF)ICIELLE. There, it’s worth mentioning Cynthia Daignault’s photographic and painterly meditation on images of the Matterhorn for New York gallery Lisa Cooley; British artist Merlin James’ solo show of his expanded landscape painting practice at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; London-based Italian artist Salvatore Arancio at Rome’s Federica Schiavo Gallery alongside Jay Heikes; and Jacqueline Mesmaeker’s beautiful photo-sculptural installations at Nadja Vilenne, Liège.
At Galerie Tatjana Pieters, Belgian artist Philippe Van Snick’s ten-colour palette and associated aesthetic limitations proved in reality to allow an ongoing multiplicity of forms and encounters. Andreas Angelidakis’s series of ‘bibelots’, 3D-prints resting atop internally decorated vitrines, at The Breeder (Athens) were a highlight. As was French artist Sarah Tritz at Paris Galerie Anne Barrault, whose work included a trashy fake-hair and bead sculpture and large collage of a seductively angled naked arse.
Last but not least, who could forget the darling, not just of ‘post-internet’, but of contemporary art in general. Amalia Ulman’s solo show at the booth of ltd los angeles was a total hit, making one wonder how the artist could put a foot wrong. One of the large digitally printed tapestries Ulman had produced for the fair seems a good note to finish on. Depicting two African children in school uniform, a girl whispering to a boy, the serif embroidered text reads:
‘What Have You Heard About MONEY?’
‘What Does It Mean?’ ‘How Does It Harm Us?’ ‘Who Can Get It?’ ‘What Causes It?’ ‘How Can We Stop It?’ What Can We Do For People Who Have It?’ ‘Can It Be Cured?’ ‘What Does It Look Like?’ ‘Which Of Us Has It?’
‘Don’t GUESS the Answers! LEARN THE TRUTH ABOUT MONEY!’ **
When I speak to Sophia Al-Maria, I haven’t read Virgin with a Memory yet. It’s the companion text to the London-based artist’s solo exhibition of the same name –opening at Manchester’s Cornerhouse on September 5 –and one so evocative and unsettling that I suspect the interview might have gone differently if I had. “Something delicious and fresh about the violence”, says the sentence fragment about an unnamed film set in Belfast (“blown up”) in a note dated March 10, 2014. It’s nestled among the collection of emails, diary entries and fictional narrative; headshots, script excerpts and kit lists, making up Virgin with a Memory: The Exhibition Tie-in and could just as easily be applied to its content:
“So let’s spend today thinking of ingenious ways to hide and dispose of bodies and discuss tomorrow
See you tomorrow
Producer One”
Sophia Al-Maria, The Watchers No. 1 – 5 (2014). Five-channel digital video (silent). Courtesy and copyright the artist.
“For some reason I keep being dragged back to these subjects”, Al-Maria chuckles, between sighs and over the phone from her hotel room in Manchester. She seems exhausted, and not just because I’ve caught her in the middle of the Virgin with a Memory install but she’s on the line to talk about a feature-length film she’d spent the last two-and-a-half years working on, only for it to essentially come to nothing. “This show is not a eulogy but a way of displaying all the supplementary materials that went into working on the production”, she tells me about the collection of pseudo-documentary footage and video installations built from the remains of Beretta. It’s a film that would have been a rape-revenge thriller set in Egypt and inspired by Abel Ferrara’s cult-classic Ms. 45, where mute and man-hating prey becomes predator on a killing spree after one too many abuses.
As a fan of Al-Maria’s work and writing, I’d read her memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth, watched her videos, and seen the work of eight-strong collective the GCC. I followed her blog and more writing on Gulf Futurism across articles in Dazed and Art After the Internet. None of it could prepare me for this:
“I could barely shut the refrigerator door. I had to put his head in the freezer. In the end I used the electric carving knife to get through the tangle of bone at his back. If I had a machete it would have been easier.”
The body above is not just human but ‘tomcat’, or ‘pig’, depending on which simile you choose to describe the men Beretta’s heroine, Sueda, murders as revenge for their part in making her life a living hell. Scattered in fragments across its Virgin with a Memory novelisation, the film-that-would-be is a product of Al-Maria’s own experience as a student in Cairo, set to the backdrop of the 2011 Arab Spring. “Beretta is not only the story of a mute, repressed woman pushed to extremes by her environment,” Al-Maria writes in an excerpt of explanatory notes as part of the book, “but it is the story of a people, raped and degraded by their government, culminating in revolt.”
Sophia Al-Maria, The Watchers No. 1 – 5 (2014). Five-channel digital video (silent). Courtesy and copyright the artist.
I remember you writing in The Girl Who Fell To Earth about your experience of Egypt, where you were basically assaulted.
Sophia Al-Maria: Many times. That was one example.
Because the country has become known for being one of the worst countries in the Arab world to be a woman?
SA-M: Well, in the same way that Mumbai is famous for what has been going on there with mob attacks. Certainly, it’s become aggravated by the general chaos of post-2011. In the past I’ve been involved with and continue to support activist groups [in Egypt] trying, from the ground up, to help combat this problem of harassment on the streets. The real issue is that, within living memory, if a man was caught harassing a woman in the street in Cairo, the people who witnessed it would grab him and shave his head so that he would be publicly humiliated.
That just doesn’t happen anymore. Everyone sort of acquiesces to the general anger and aggression of frustrated men. I think that it doesn’t matter with regards to culture, as much as a mixture of over-population and repression. If London was as crowded as Egypt is, I suspect that there would be much more public harassment on the street.
You talk about the film in past-tense, is it not going to go ahead?
SA-M: The film will go ahead but in a different form. We got funding and were waylaid by legal issues at the very last minute, which are hilarious because the financiers wanted something called ‘right of title’. Abel Ferrara, who made the original Ms. 45, was very into the project and was very supportive but then it turned out that the original porn company who produced Ms. 45 had disappeared and Warner Brothers had bought the rights. Then it turned into this kafka-esque farce of trying to get the rights to this movie.
Plus the writer of the film, Nicholas St John has become a monk and moved on top of a mountain somewhere in France, disavowed everything he’s ever done and refuses to sign anything. So in the end we were stuck because somebody somewhere along the line stuck his foot in his mouth and said we should get the rights to this movie so that we can say it’s the ‘Egyptian Ms 45’ which was a huge mistake.
So I’m rewriting it, basically. I’m hopefully going to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab this January and restaging it elsewhere, not in Cairo, and trying to get it back on its legs in a new form. It’s a universal story. I just wanted to set it in Egypt because that is the root of my interest in the subject matter and my experience. But I think there are many other places in the world where this is equally relevant.
In the blurb for Virgin with a Memory, it says a Beretta actress was arrested?
SA-M: Yes. Not the main actress but the second lead who’s the heart of the film. She’s the reason that a lot of the events go down. I wanted there to be a sort of sisterly friendship that causes the revenge, not just what happens to the main character. The main character is raped and is unable to speak to anyone about it because it’s a cop and she internalises all this fear and anxiety –what to do with the body and all these things –until her best friend is compromised and she then goes in and saves her from a sort of bunga bunga party situation, which she has found herself in.
So the actress, who was incredible and blew everyone away in the audition, was unfortunately put in jail. She’s in for a year, which will be up, I think, next spring. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, accused of smuggling drugs and used as a scapegoat because she was very popular on television at the time. One of the videos that’s in the show [‘Class A’ (2014)] is a sort of love-letter to her. It’s using her audition tapes with footage of an interview she gave where the woman interviewing her is this sort of evil Nicole Kidman type who is being so cruel to her and asking her questions to try to sort of throw her off. There’s these really aggressive bits and then these fractured images of her audition tapes mixed in with it.
I watched the two year-old promotional video for Beretta on vimeo.
SA-M: Yeah. That was done before we got the producers involved; it was just me with a thirty-page version of the script. I’d been in Cairo with a friend and shot some of that stuff with a Nokia, and some random evening cut it together. It had a bit of the vibe of what I wanted and there’s going to be a companion piece shown at Manchester, which was done without my knowledge by the producer.
He took some rushes that we had shot in Cairo and then made this thing to try to convince financiers; he had done a little shoot with the actress on his own and everything, which I found… he really had gone behind my back as the director. So I’m displaying that as well, as a sort of example of the power dynamic between producers and directors these days, which is shifting more and more to the producers, as money gets more and more difficult to raise.
That’s interesting because if you think about that in conjunction with your involvement in the Whose Gaze Is It Anyway? exhibition, when a producer –who I’m assuming is a man –shoots with the woman lead without your knowledge…
SA-M: Yeah, and saying it was a surprise [laughs]. I was working on a new draft of the script. I met up with him after I’d finished and he said, ‘I have a surprise for you!’ and he shows me this ‘taster’ for the financiers. He’d shot this stuff with her and used a Kanye West song underneath. It was a bit of a creative rape moment where, ‘you’ve just taken this thing out of my head, put your own spin on it and then shown it to the people who are supposed to be giving us money. And this is completely not what I want’. It has the actress putting the gun in her garter belt. It was all very, sort of like ‘gaze-y’. I think he worked very hard to get the project where it is, or where it was, and he got a little carried away at that moment. I think in retrospect he understands that [laughs].
Kanye West is an interesting choice.
SA-M: Yeah it’s funny, of all people.
You also mentioned the relationship between directors and producers is shifting as it becomes harder to raise money, that’s pretty much a universal theme when it comes to economic and social stratification.
SA-M: Yeah, things are polarising and its this, sort of, drift. It’s the one per cent and 99 per cent. It’s the corporation and the individual. It’s all of those things. I think these little titles like ‘producer’, or ‘curator’ or whatever will eventually become irrelevant when it becomes ‘studio’ and ‘content’ [laughs]. It’s interesting; things like television, for example, where the director’s role has been massively downsized and now it’s writers who are the show runners. Writers rooms are far more in control and directors shuffle in and out as workmen, or tradespeople on shows. Things are really changing, I think. This is a totally random sidenote…
No, I think it’s all relevant. Like you say, writers are running the show. Even when you think about how history is written, you have a specific set of people who have the privilege of writing it.
SA-M: Yeah absolutely. People link that shift in power to the writer’s strike a few years ago in the US, which then led to things like The Sopranos and these big showpiece series’. And, of course, that’s all about the strike, and about the collective, right? Writer’s finally putting their foot down and taking power but I don’t know what the moral of that story is.
Sophia Al-Maria, The Watchers No. 1 – 5 (2014). Five-channel digital video (silent). Courtesy and copyright the artist.
When you think about it, the outcome is Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos. They’re all pretty macho.
SA-M: Yeah, and actually the one’s that are overtly trying to subvert that are often really unsuccessful, like The United States of Tara or… there’s one recently with Laura Dern…
Enlightened.
SA-M: Yeah, yeah. I mean, these ones, you hear about them and stuff but they’re not like Game of Thrones or True Detective –which I am so pissed off about, it’s not H.P. Lovecraft, fuck-off everyone. It’s just macho. It uses women as props in the shows… there is much to be torn back because, again, writers’ rooms, as with most things, are still male-dominated. I guess you have your Lena Dunhams but they’re tokenised.
I read an interesting observation that in art, it’s an industry that’s so low-paid and it seems to be woman-dominated, at least on an administrative level.
SA-M: [laughs] Yeah. Hey, there can only be one explanation and that’s money. If you follow the money, you’ll get your answers. Always. **
Following on from their Achievements in Swiss Summit exhibition during London’s Frieze week last month, the celebrations continue for the GCC art collective, at Berlin’s Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler gallery. In their second show as a ‘delegation’ named after the regional government body, Gulf Cooperation Council, Ceremonial Achievements again pulls focuses on parade over practicality. Now in the hands of politicians and officials, the PR campaign of success well-celebrated in the Gulf is passed on as its nine artists -spanning Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, and including Khalid Al Gharaballi, Fatima and Monira Al Qadiri, and Sophia Al-Maria -investigate traditions and icons of self-congratulations.
A screen on the floor projects ‘Ceremonial Projects in Motion’, a video of stately-looking men in the traditional Arabic thobe with large scissors in their hands cutting inaugurating ribbons. They smile and lift their hands as the tape falls and crowds applaud, before a new clip of a similar ritual begins. In each one, the same characters mimic the same ceremony, leaving one disoriented and dislocated: are we applauding the opening of a new shopping mall, with shiny floors, in Kuwait, or is it a children’s hospital in Qatar? Solemnly proud music plays alongside it, while this parody of personal victory, in self-promotion repeated, becomes absurd; the characters themselves becoming caricatures, without overstatement.
GCC, ‘Protocols for Achievements’ (2013). Courtesy of the artists & Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Hans-Georg Gaul.
At the center of the room, a smaller screen shows a glowing and outlined presenter gesticulating in front of a projection of similar video loops in ‘Protocols for Achievements’. Screening information in Arabic beneath her, the presenter could be reporting the news or presenting said ‘protocols’ to her audience. Only, its impossible to tell by her body language alone as she stands mute. There’s no concrete information to draw from the text, doubtless incomprehensible to many a Berliner viewer, as she mimes in time with the sound from ‘Ceremonial Projects in Motion’ echoing throughout the whole exhibition.
Hanging on a nearby wall, an image from the GCC’s induction in Switzerland earlier this year (as well as the earlier London show), ‘Inaugural Summit, Morschach 2013, 7’, shows three figures, presumably men, sat on a picnic blanket on the bitumen and sharing tea, photographed only from the waist down. Again, it’s not so much the content of the image, or even the identity of its subjects but the ceremony around it that matters.
Spanning the width of a wall in the inner space of the two-room gallery, the most visible piece in Ceremonial Achievements is enacted. It’s a screening of a make-believe ribbon ceremony by GCC, taking place in a grand hall. Several people take part by standing still, forming a circle and holding a red ribbon between them. The other three walls of the room display photos of the same event, a series called ‘Ceremonial Sphere’, taken from different perspectives and digitally printed on circular aluminium dibond. A marble veneer stall stands proudly in front of the large-scale projection, presenting a trophy-like ship’s wheel. With a map of the world at the centre of this golden sculpture, ‘Berlin Congratulant’ echoes the same glass sculptures from the GCC’s Achievements in Swiss Summit. As before, the source of these ‘achievements’ and their outcomes are nowhere to be found, the round shapes, circular motion and endless repetition leading to nothing. **
In furthering their efforts “to reinforce and serve Gulf and Artistic causes” the recently formed art collective GCC, will be celebrating their accomplishments made during their first meeting in Morscach, Switzerland. In a corporatised global tradition, with a government sanctioned edge, the group aims represent their “official Communiqué” as “a High Level Strategic Dialogue” for their Achievement in Swiss Summit at Mayfair’s Project Native Informant, opening October 18 and running, through Frieze week, to November 16.
Forged in 2013 and featuring Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Amal Khalaf, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid, Fatima Al Qadiri, Khalid al Gharaballi, Monira Al Qadiri, Nanu Al-Hamad and Sophia Al Maria, there’s no doubting the delegation’s efforts to reaffirm “their common desire to enhance and diversify these strong relations in the artistic field”.
