Jameel Arts brings together politics and history through the eyes of artists

20 artists document in Dubai the "painful facts of Asia"

  • Texts, drawings, paintings and installations included in the “Proposals for a Monument to Partition”.

    Cinematography: Mostafa Qassemi

  • Mortada Vali: “The works were collected in a way that allows the recipient to see the difference in the media and the artists’ handling of them.”

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From texts, drawings, paintings and installation works, as well as video and audio, 20 artists presented their works that monitor painful facts and events, and shocking transformations in South Asian countries, in a group exhibition that was recently opened at Jameel Arts Center in Dubai, entitled “Proposals for a Monument to Partition”, under the supervision of Curator: Murtaza Vali.

Contrasting shapes

The recipient can contemplate the different forms of memorials that could have been erected, if the participants were asked to present them, if they deliberately dealt with political events through artistic visions that transcend in this historical event all the painful facts.

The exhibition, which runs until February 19, features well-known artists and emerging voices appearing in the Middle East for the first time

Urgent warehouse

The exhibition comes as if it is the eye witness to the events that took place nearly 75 years ago, especially as the number of witnesses to these events dwindles with the passage of time.

Through drawings, audio or video installations, the artists capture the events that occurred in the aftermath of British colonial rule in 1947, when this crucial period led to partition, giving rise to forms of dispersal, migration, conflict and the construction of complex identities that spanned decades.

The works in the exhibition embody the scars etched in the societies and peoples of the Indian subcontinent, as artists take on the task of depicting memorials to an event in which opinions differ and conflicting interpretations accumulate.

sarcasm

The artists’ proposals confirm the impossibility of a single memorial or a unified narrative expressing all these events, as the works carry satirical forms, as well as serious and painful, or even immersed in the official form, as they carry us on the board of memory and the past into the penetration of different artistic worlds.

Artist Aziz Hazara presented a set of photographs indicating the kinds of games that Baluch and Pashtun people were playing while waiting to cross the military border, while the collaborative work of artist Shilpa Gupta invites more than 100 people to draw a map of their country from memory, and finally reflects their fragile gathering to change national borders and belonging. .

On the other hand, the artist Fahd Baraki relies heavily on irony in his work, to highlight the contradiction between ideals and how they are applied.

The entire works come as a cumulative method that addresses memory, as a group of new works are presented alongside the old ones, translated from English into Bengali, Hindi, Kannada and Urdu, and distributed throughout the exhibition, especially through the participation of Sehir Shah and Shilpa Gupta with new proposals 11 years after their first proposals. The new proposals dealt with the changing political landscape on the one hand, and new approaches to their artistic practices on the other.

projects

The curator of the exhibition, Mortada Vali, told Emirates Today, "Last August, the 75th anniversary of the partition that took place in 1947, when India was separated and Pakistan was established, and the events witnessed a lot of violence, and these facts had many aspects. The tragic event, as it was remarkable to me that there is no museum that perpetuates this incident, and that is why I asked the artists to work on this topic.”

Valley added: "There are many sketches in the exhibition, which are considered the beginning of any artwork, and this is due to the fact that the main title of the exhibition is proposals for monuments, and this leads to the fact that the existing works are projects that are subject to development and change."

He noted that when art talks about politics, it presents many events in a new and different way. Politics builds a vision of homelands, and art works to present homelands in softer forms, as well as in a way that incites correct thinking and seeing facts from a new perspective.

He stressed that working on collecting works from very different media was a complex task, and that is why it was collected in a way that allows the recipient to see the difference in the media and the artists' handling of them.

Public Programs The exhibition "Proposals for a Monument to Partition" is accompanied by a range of expanded public programs such as discussions, seminars, films and various educational opportunities for all ages, during the exhibition's eight-month period.

Curator of this exhibition, New York-based Morteza Valli, who regularly contributes to Art Jameel's programs, was curator of Jameel Arts Center's inaugural 2018 show "Raw", and other projects with the Sharjah Biennial.

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