For the last seven years, Art Dubai has developed a series of non-profit, commissioned works to exhibit alongside the fair. They present an opportunity for visitors to engage with artists often informed by or from the region, who create new works and performances intended to question the fabric of an art fair.

For 2016, independent curator and writer Yasmina Reggad, who was tapped to lead the projects and commissions, invited Doa Aly, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Massinissa Selmani, Lydia Ourahmane and Areej Kaoud, Moza Almatrooshi, and Jumairy, as well as the art collective Nile Sunset Annex. Reggad, whose research area is currently focused on the politics of futurity, has aptly titled the series of commissions Into the Unknown, meant as a catalyst to bring forth questions underlying the “mechanism[s] of the production of our fantasies, expectations and projections triggered by this young, 44-year-old federal state [of the United Arab Emirates]”. 

Commenting on the Art Dubai Project for 2016, Reggad notes that the “commissioned artists have developed or made use of speculative approaches engaging with conjectures and hypothetical narratives anchored in the present, to research and discuss topics such as architecture, cartography, safety, sleep, constructed speech and labor.”

Prior to the fair, ArtAsiaPacific interviewed artists Doa Aly, Sreshta Rit Premnath and members of the Nile Sunset Annex to discuss their projects for Art Dubai 2016.

Artist Doa Aly started her career with an interest in the body, anatomy and movement, which evolved over the years into a focus on psychology, ideas of power, sexuality and language. Her art practice spans drawings, painting, performance-based videos and text-collages that are inspired by classical fiction, medical literature, mythology, philosophy and, most recently, current news articles.

Your work spans a number of mediums, but this is the first time you will be engaging in live performance at Art Dubai as part of the Projects section. Can you tell us a bit about why you chose this context for the live performance and, also, what led to this progression in your practice?

It was actually Yasmina Reggad’s idea. Normally, I would steer clear of live performances, [even though] I’ve had people ask me for live performances since I started exhibiting. My videos are mostly performed by amateurs, and the nature of the choreographies and characters of the actors are meant for video [and relies] on editing and cutting between various takes. When Yasmina invited me to do an Art Dubai Project, she wanted me to choreograph a live performance—she said she trusted me completely, and I thought maybe it was time to face the challenge. However, it called for an immediate change of strategy. I hired a professional dancer, and already some of the vulnerability and awkwardness present in the video work was gone. I have had to find another way of communicating affect, and I still don’t know if what we’re planning to do will work. The context of Art Dubai could actually work in my favor, providing novelty to the experiment. If it’s an amazing performance, it will surely be noticed, but if it’s not ripe, then it’s better for it to drown in the background noise. Either way, we will have been through the experience, and the dancer and I are hopefully learning something. I still can’t speak of whether this will be a progression in my practice or a one-off experience. There’s always something magical about odd projects; they can make me change course or just remain as a one-time experiment. They at least teach me something about my tolerance levels and physical limits, which is always welcome.

Could you talk us through the texts you have selected as a basis for the performances?

The text, which is only used in the soundtrack, is from a passage in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber, written between 1900 to 1903. The chapter is about compulsive thinking, in which Schreber talks in detail about his auditory hallucinations—the words he hears and how often he hears them. The choreographies are taken from a psychiatric documentary film that I found on Archive.org, called Symptoms of Schizophrenia, and dates back to the 1940s. The video shows various patients wearing masks, probably to protect their identities, performing symptoms of various catatonic diseases. With the two references merged into a “dance,” I’m linking schizophrenia, the mental ailment that was much documented and written about in pejorative terms during the first half of the 20th century, to a normalized state of “schizophrenic” speech and thought, which characterizes our contemporary existence. [It is a] hypothesis that has generated minimal and fragmented movement meant to embody the feelings of anxiety and alienation rather than produce meaning, much like the writings of Schreber.

You work with pencil drawings, particularly those that reference figures from dance history books, along with the illustrations of catatonic patients and studies of 20th-century human anatomy. Do these studies instruct the process within the performative streams of your practice?

I use a 1949 edition of Gray’s Anatomy, because its illustrations of human anatomy were produced using etchings and drawings. When I make tracings of these illustrations, or the photographic documentation of schizophrenic patients, I am essentially replicating drawings and representations for the purpose of creating a self-contained, basic experience. When these ideas are transferred to a time-based medium, they are best suggested through performance. Repetition, immanence and displacement are main themes there as well. 

What projects and/or exhibitions do you have coming up this year?

I just finished a multi-channel video project entitledHouse of Rumor, which will be premiering on March 31 in Cairo, as part of the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival. After that I am taking a long break until July.

Sreshta Rit Premnath works across multiple media, investigating systems of representation and reflecting on the process by which images become icons and events become history.

For Art Dubai you are showing an iteration of Plot, previously explored in solo exhibitions at Chicago’s Tony Wight Gallery (2012); Gallery SKE in Bangalore (2013); and The Bindery Project in St. Paul, Minnesota (2014). How did this project start and how has it developed in recent years?

Growing up in Bangalore during the 1980s and ‘90s, I saw the city grow very rapidly. This development of expensive real estate depended intimately on migrant workers who moved to the city from surrounding villages. It struck me that the people who actually built the city owned next to nothing and lived either in slums or in shacks at the construction site. The word “plot” began to signify both a piece of land ready for “development,” as well as a piece of land the size of a body—the minimum space that a laborer who owns nothing might occupy. I began to use sandboxes and body-sized sheets of sand to signify this contradiction between the bodily occupation of space on the one hand and the ownership of space on the other.

The central figure in my project from 2012, The Last Image, is MS Ramaiah, a property developer who believed he would die if he ever stopped building. In the looped video I Will Die When I Stop Building, I allude to a link between the developer’s fear of death, and the “death drive” that fuels development in India. More recently, in my project at [New York’s] Queens Museum, a piece titled Projections (1964/2014) (2015) focused on the tendency for luxury developments in Bangalore to be named after places in America. In this piece I layered a press photograph of the Indian Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair—which had been held at the current site of the Queens Museum—with a photograph of a billboard from Bangalore advertising a luxury apartment complex. The billboard reads, “New York Living In Bangalore.” This “nominal displacement,” as I call it, reveals the contradictory desires of a developing city—a simultaneous desire to be both here and elsewhere.

Can you expand on how the works from this series, which you are showing as part of Art Dubai Projects, respond specifically to the locality of Dubai and the wider region? In particular, what conceptual basis ties the two elements of the series, Projections (8000 miles/10 seconds apart) and Slump (Tired/Tiered)?

A few months ago, Donald Trump, a businessman and current presidential contender of the United States, proposed that if he was elected he would ban Muslims from entering America. This statement was met with international outrage, and Trump’s partner in Dubai temporarily removed his name and image from all Damac-Trump advertising. Projections (8000 miles/10 seconds apart) layers two press photographs, shot 10 seconds apart, of a billboard advertising the Damac-Trump luxury residential complex. Adhered to corrugated roofing material, one photograph shows the billboard at the moment of redaction, while the second shows a section of the sign that displays the slogan “The Beverly Hills of Dubai,” revealing a political and fantastical entanglement between two areas separated by 8,000 miles.  

The sculptures that comprise Slump (Tired/Tiered) are made up of bunk-bed-like structures with body-shaped sheets of sand draped over them. Part of an ongoing series, these sculptures are in reference to laborers, who own no property and relinquish their only remaining resource, labor power, when they sleep.

Throughout your work we find references to scale, or perhaps systems of representation, or the practical means (and thereby limitations) through which our abilities to decipher, reason and know are defined via language, but also through measurement and territory. Can you talk about how you intend for the viewer to engage on this level with Projections (8000 miles/10 seconds apart) and Slump (Tired/Tiered)?

Systems of representation simultaneously make possible and limit our ability to understand the world. In Projections the reference to the time between two consecutive photographs (10 seconds), and the distance between the cause and effect of an event (8,000 miles), become a way to think about the entanglement of politics and capital that knots our increasingly global world.  However, at its very foundation is the simple, hard fact of exploited bodies that physically labor to build this global infrastructure. 

What are other projects, research and/or exhibitions that you have coming up this year?

I am currently developing two projects, one titled Cadere that will be shown in Italy, which proposes a performative relation between the Polish conceptual artist André Cadere and the immigrant rose sellers in Italy. A second project titled Proposition 7.0 will take me to Kathmandu and Kailash Mansarovar [a spiritual pilgrimage to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar in Tibet] in the Himalayas for research, and will reconsider tantric painting through the work of the late modernist Indian artist Prabhakar Barwe.

Nile Sunset Annex is an evolving production and dispersion outfit for contemporary art. Founded in 2013, it is a small self-funded art space that puts on exhibitions of artists’ work in a flat in Cairo, but its members also act as publisher, art collector, archivist, editor, technician, as well as artist, author, barmaid and curator, when necessary. Its current iteration consists of Taha Belal, Jenifer Evans and Andeel.

Your collective, Nile Sunset Annex, works across a number of platforms—from editors and archivists to barmaids and curators. Can you tell us a bit about your project at Art Dubai and the levels upon which you will be engaging with the other projects through a “publication” format?

Our previous publications have each taken a different format, from a vinyl record to ceramic tiles to a 3D-printed sculpture. For Art Dubai, we’re making a series of multiples called 70 Artist Toasts (titled في صحة الفنانين ٧٠ مرة  in Arabic). We have developed one object in relation to the work of each the other seven artists in the section, and are making an edition of 10 of each object. The second component of each piece is a shaped text printed on thick paper, on which the object will be displayed upon. The process has been quite intuitive. We went through the Art Dubai project proposals and looked at the other artists’ previous works, and we also reached out by email to each artist to ask if they wanted to be involved or share their thoughts. Through this we came up with both the object, including its form and materials, as well as the text for each artist. Two artists had more active input in the text we wrote for them—Areej Kaoud and Jumairy.

What are the principles by which you navigate projects or develop programs? For example, could you take us through your process and approach for the Art Dubai commission?

Because we are a small, self-funded operation, in general we develop our programing by taking on artists and projects we are really excited about and that we can manage logistically around our full-time jobs.

For Art Dubai, we had a series of Skype calls with Yasmina Reggad and, after our initial proposal didn’t work out, she suggested the idea of publications. We love producing publications, so we agreed straight away. We decided to work with different craftspeople in Cairo to make them, as we have relied a lot on local skilled workers for previous exhibitions and publications.

You are based in Cairo, working from an apartment space. How much of the artists’ and viewers’ engagement with this physical space relevant to your working practice as a collective? Is there an intended or unintentional meaning to the use of a more intimate context for your projects?

We have always been interested in embracing the semi-domestic feel of the room and not trying to make it like a white cube. The artists we have exhibited in the space have embraced that, although no one has actually made work that explicitly responds to the domesticity of setting. We like to think that viewers often resonate with the intimacy of it—they frequently stop for a drink with us—but on the other hand, having such a small, semi-public space keeps us under the radar of the state and means our audience tends not to be huge.

When you are commissioned to do projects such as with Art Dubai Projects, which take you out of this space, it presents perhaps an opportunity to reconsider/reconfigure or even research future possibilities for the realization of Nile Sunset Annex within different contexts and with different resources. Are there any conceptual and process-driven considerations you have taken from this commission (in particular in the context of Art Dubai, an art fair) that you may expand further?

Good question. We think we are yet to find out exactly how the process of making this piece will manifest itself in the future, but each time we have done a project outside our space it has been a revelatory learning experience. For example, when we curated an 11-artist group show at Cairo’s Gypsum Gallery last year, it enabled us to map out the interests and modes of presentation we had developed over the previous couple of years by doing what we do on a much larger scale and with a better budget. When we did an exhibition as a collective at San Francisco’s Haines Gallery in 2015, and because the show was an artwork that functioned as a mini-retrospective, it was a way to step back and assess our activities and a bit like taking a photograph of them. For Art Dubai, it is the first time we are creating a series of publications/multiples, and the first time we are doing anything at an art fair, so it is bound to impact future projects.

What is in the future for Nile Sunset Annex?

We are currently hosting an exhibition by painter Ahmed Nosseir, until March 26. After that, we are considering putting on a show of the Art Dubai multiples, and we are planning two solo exhibitions by Taha Belal and Jenifer Evans, respectively, in May and June. We haven’t shown exhibitions of our own work in the space, so that will be fun. We are also working on a glossary project for the Mophradat [formerly the Young Arab Theatre Fund] website, and are planning to start a collaboration with French artist Benjamin Seror soon.