How 'engaging with current events' informed Barjeel's landmark exhibition in London

UK capital show of modern Arab works produced from 1990 onwards has been curated as an educational exercise

Here and Now 2 by Bashar Alhroub. Photo: Barjeel Art Foundation

When Sultan Al Qassemi was invited to teach a class at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, the founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation saw an opportunity to implement a unique educational exercise.

SOAS is renowned for having its own purpose-built modern gallery space, a distinct feature in London’s pedagogical landscape. This inspired Al Qassemi into refashioning his class into a workshop, which culminated with SOAS students curating an exhibition that featured works from the foundation’s collection.

The exhibition, Hudood: Rethinking Boundaries, running until September 21, is a landmark event for the Barjeel Art Foundation. It marks the first time that a show by the institution has been dedicated to Arab artworks produced from 1990 onwards.

Several factors inspired the focus on contemporary art, Al Qassemi says. Just last year, the Barjeel Art Foundation staged an exhibition at the Christie’s head office in London. The exhibition, titled Kawkaba, presented highlights from the foundation’s robust collection of modern Arab art. As such, Al Qassemi says he wanted to shift the focus to feature the contemporary works from the foundation that are “less seen by the public”.

“I should also say that most of these students are concerned about contemporary events,” Al Qassemi says. “I felt that this is important for them to engage with current events.”

Hudood: Rethinking Boundaries presents more than 40 works by Arab artists that were produced from 1990 onwards. These include a number of notable names, including Mona Hatoum, Hayv Kahraman, Larissa Sansour, Ahmed Mater, Manal Al Dowayan and Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim.

After weeks of readings, classroom discussions and guest lectures, the students pored through the foundation’s collection of contemporary artworks. The exhibition was a way to apply what they had learnt during the workshop. Yet, selecting works was not a straightforward task.

While the Barjeel Art Foundation is well known for its sprawling body of modern Arab art, it also has more than 700 contemporary works. “We were sifting through so much,” SOAS student Chloe-Kate Abel says. “The initial approach was to choose a set of five to eight works that we were drawn to. From there, we sort of came up with, a more cohesive theme that we could synthesise all the works within.”

The thematic thread that the students drew becomes clear when considering the exhibition’s title and its artworks. Hudood, which translates from Arabic to borders, examines issues related to belonging and the identities that seek to transcend the boundaries imposed upon them. These topics are addressed in various fronts, from the material and architectural to the metaphysical.

In Here and Now 2, for instance, Bashar Alhroub examines the tensions of being a Palestinian who has moved abroad.

The artist began the Here and Now series in 2010, when he was a student at the Winchester School of Art. He had sought to visually evoke the schism he felt after he relocated to the UK, where he was no longer subject to the Israeli checkpoints and travel restrictions he faced in Palestine.

The series features photographs of himself in landscapes with his head encased in a mirrored cube. In Here and Now 2, he is laying on a forest path, presumably at a park in the UK, with the cube reflecting the discoloured leaves on the ground. His body is anchored in the landscape. His mind, on the other hand, is elsewhere.

“We spoke about this concept of identity, and how, as a Palestinian artist, that is such an important theme to hold on to,” says student Safa Kamran, who interviewed Alhroub as part of Hudood’s research process and the exhibition’s accompanying publication.

Alhroub’s works have become more explicitly related to Palestinian issues since the Israel-Gaza war began in October. Here and Now 2 is more subtle, but still presents a facet of that tension, particularly reflecting the diasporic anxiety of existing in the present, while still embodying the identity and social issues of a homeland left behind.

“He kind of makes the point of not making Palestinian identity a main focus of his artworks, especially in his older work,” Kamran says. “He said that he didn't want to focus on that aspect of identity previously, but now he does.”

While Alhroub’s Here and Now 2 touches upon more nebulous notions of identity and the struggle for self-realisation in the face of borders, there are works within Hudood that address these issues in material terms. “When I was looking through the works [in the collection], two stood out to me the most, which is what my what my essay is about,” says student Shamsa Alnahyan.

Concrete Block II by Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem and Die Wahrheit Ist Konkret (The Truth is Concrete) by Egyptian artist Ganzeer address the implications of concrete but in very different ways.

“I grew up in Dubai, and my whole life I've been, you know, kind of surrounded by all these concrete structures,” Alnahyan says. “Concrete was something that was always safe for me to be in. But then, concrete has also been used in not so positive ways … it creates apartheid walls. It creates refugee camps.”

In her essay, Alnahyan delves into how Gharem and Ganzeer reveal these qualities in their works. Concrete Block II recreates a roadblock using plywood. The surface of the work is covered in rubber stamps that hark back to the time Gharem was as a major in the Saudi army.

“As he sat on his desk for hours on end, the stamp became his weapon,” Alnahyan writes in her essay. “It was a gavel of sorts, stamping countless official documents in a binary manner: ‘stamp’ or ‘no-stamp’. Through this action, there is no in-between.”

The artwork highlights how concrete is utilised to fortify and materialise intangible boundaries. “It is a boundary building medium that is very much controlled by who wields it,” Alnahyan says. “If what's in their heart and what's in their mind is to control, block and censor. It's what they're going to use it for.”

While Ganzeer imparts a similar message, he does so in a very different way. In Die Wahrheit Ist Konkret, concrete is reclaimed as a tool for public interests. The work features a civilian armed with an outline of a rifle. He is smoking a cigarette and staring defiantly back at the viewer. The work’s title is sprayed in the foreground as graffiti.

The divisive power of construction echoes throughout several works in the exhibition. In Kader Attia’s Zene 4, the Algerian-French artist presents a cluster of apartment buildings hovering above a white space. The work alludes, Abel says, to the concrete modernist structures that are built on the outskirts of major French cities.

“Attia himself actually grew up in these buildings,” Abel says. “Zene 4 owes its name to being built on what’s called La Zone. Those [buildings] were actually where the medieval walls of Paris were once built. It then became this liminal space in this periphery zone where actually most of the immigrants coming from France’s former colonies are relegated to live. And it comes into this question of who can be French and who can’t.”

The work is displayed in conversation with Algerian artist Aicha Haddad’s Ghardaia, which is one of the two older pieces within Hudood. While the latter is colourfully rendered with thickly-set oil, Attia’s collage is starkly presented in monochrome, alluding to how the vibrancy of a culture is sapped in such housing projects.

Finally, Hudood brings its exploration of identity back to the Gulf region, and specifically Dubai, a city that student Elika Blake says “sits in this kind of liminal space between being extremely modern and also a traditional society. This condition argues that the society doesn't have to be either or, but can be both of those things at once”.

Several artworks by artists from the UAE reflect upon this in the exhibition. Some juxtapose the country’s concurrent nature of tradition and modernity explicitly, including Lateefa bint Maktoum’s Oral Tradition and Reem Al Ghaith’s photograph Frame 4 from her Held Back series.

Others take a more metaphoric approach, such as Farah Al Qasimi’s photograph Landfill Flowers. The landscape in the background is “foregrounded by this kind of new growth and this idea of prosperity,” Blake says. “This kind of contrast that was present in a lot of the works that I selected.”

Barjeel Art Foundation's Hudood: Rethinking Boundaries is running at the SOAS Gallery until September 21