Balancing tradition and modernity: New book explores Emirati identity in contemporary art

Sophie Kazan Makhlouf reflects on the UAE's creative scene from its formation in 1971 to the present day

Abdul Qader Al Rais, the first Emirati visual artist who features in the book. Khushnum Bhandari / The National

Charting the visual and oral art history of a country is no small feat, but Lebanese-British art historian Sophie Kazan Makhlouf has sought to detail that in The Development of an Art History in the UAE: An Art Not Made to Be Understood.

Out in hardback next week, the book serves as a study of the UAE's creative scene from the country's confederation in 1971 to the present day. It draws on Kazan Makhlouf's experience in Abu Dhabi, where she worked in the arts and cultural programme of the Emirates Foundation from 2007 to 2011, as well as her PhD research after returning to the UK, which contrasted traditional and modern cultural forms.

“There’s been a lot written about how the critical eye in the UAE differs from that in the West,” says Kazan Makhlouf. “But more than that, there needs to be a different language. In the UAE, often when people talk about art history they assume there's only one art history, and it's contemporary.

"When people are writing about art and exhibitions, they should have a broader range of discourses available to them – and consider not only white British writers but also writers from other parts of the world.”

The question of the polarity between Emirati traditions and a globalised world drives the book. The academic study sets itself apart from many recent discussions of the development of art in the UAE by putting Emirati crafts and practices at the beginning of what would later become visual art.

These include henna, talli embroidery, Nabati poetry (she reproduces a poem penned by UAE Founding Father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan) and elements of everyday culture. A hand-drawn diagram, for example, contrasts the Dubai versus Fujairah style of folding one’s ghutra when not wearing the agal rope to secure it – a sartorial take on culture.

Calligraphy is also given prominence, and Kazan Makhlouf shows the way that these cultural forms saturate daily life in a way that “visual art” does not. Mohammed Mandi, for example, though his work is now collected and shown by art institutions, has a greater platform than most artists can dream of – he furnished the calligraphy that circulates on the Dh5, Dh10, Dh20 and Dh500 notes.

“There is a general misconception that art in the UAE started with Hassan Sharif,” says Kazan Makhlouf. “But it was way before that. Personally, I started at Islamic art, and that was the context I began from.”

Abdul Qader Al Rais is the first visual artist – in the European sense of the term – that she features. True to her focus on both the old and the new, she examines not just his technique but also his subjects – the world of mud brick homes and children playing in the streets, a scene now fading from the memories of the older Emirati generation.

The narrative then follows the evolution of UAE contemporary art, beginning with the conceptual shift initiated by Sharif and tracing the work of Ebtisam Abdulaziz and Mohammed Kazem. It continues through the establishment of the UAE art ecosystem among various institutions and stakeholders, concluding after the pandemic, which she highlights by noting the surge of online activity in the arts during the lockdowns.

Like any art history, Kazan Makhlouf's is partial. It hits all the major chronological stops, while also hewing to her particular interest in art’s negotiation between old and new. Some of the artists she discusses are perhaps outside choices but are relevant to her thesis and important to revisit, such as Maitha Demaithan and Karima Al Shomely.

She returns, for example, to Al Shomely’s beautiful long-form project investigating the burqa, the leather mask traditionally worn by Bedouin women, as a living heritage object, which the Emirati artist showed in a 2017 show at the Sharjah Heritage Museum.

She also highlights artists who have played a more prominent role in the development of UAE art, like Afra Al Dhaheri and Lamya Gargash, likewise pulling out their attunement to the past, such as Al Dhaheri’s installation of rope and cement blocks inspired by talli weaving (Who Has Time for It?) or Gargash's Familial Spaces of the interiors of hotel lobbies, in each of which she places a photograph of her grandmother.

What does tradition mean?

The dichotomy of “tradition vs globalisation”, however, is not straightforward. Tradition is understood as the kind of craft-based practices of a pre-industrial era. Globalisation, by contrast, is modernity – the contemporary idioms, grounded in conceptualism, that are shown as part of the global art circuit, whether at Art Dubai or Frieze London, the Guggenheim in New York or, soon, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

In her final chapter, Kazan Makhlouf explores what it means to maintain an Emirati identity today – balancing national traditions with modernity. She offers a framework of perspectives from thinkers like Indian-American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, German art historian Hans Belting and museum theorist Simon Knell. The UAE context, she argues, is unique due both to its wealth and the ongoing importance of its local traditions.

Kazan Makhlouf is keenly aware of the rapid changes in the country's art scene and the art world’s understanding of the Global South. As she points out, even the language used to describe the “region” is fraught. She navigates terms like “Arab region", which excludes Iran and Turkey, and “Middle East” (as Salwa Mikdadi, a mentor to Kazan Makhlouf, once asked: “Middle East of what? East of where?”). The challenge of recognising the Gulf's ties to South Asia is now addressed by the emerging acronym SWANA (South-west Asian and North African), which does not appear in her book but might well if it is reissued in a few years.

“This book has affected the way that I consider art as a historian. I'm made much more aware of the importance of tradition, the importance of religion and the importance of national and spiritual context," she says. "But at the same time – and this is where the example of the UAE is so important – it's really interesting to look at how open people are to change. If there is one factor that runs through art stories that I looked at, it’s change. And that is a fantastic and inspiring thing.”