Sharjah Art Foundation: March Project 2019
Rethinking cultural significance and architectural heritage
Farah Al Qasimi, Dream Soup (2019) HD video, colour, sound, 7 min 26 sec, video still 00002. Courtesy of the artists and Sharjah Art Foundation.
With text by Cecilia Ruggeri, art historian and curator.
In 2019, the sixth annual March Project, the Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual series of commissions, culminated in a group exhibition of works by Emirati artists Asma Belhamar, Farah Al Qasimi, May Rashed and Saeed Almadani, as well as Saudi artist Filwa Nazer and Colombian artist Mario Santanilla.
Spanning contemporary topics from the West Asian Cultural and social fabric to the relationships between architecture, modern construction and the body, the exhibition gives a broad sketch of Emirati and an argument for thinking about objects as storytellers and links of the past. Particularly, it emphasises video art and two installations by Emirati women artists Farah Al Qasimi and Asma Belhamar.
In her site-specific film Dream Soup, Al Qasimi pays homage to Sharjah as the location of the majority of United States Emirates-based perfume distilleries. As a recurring topos in the artist’s practice, perfume is associated with her fascination with consumer culture. In the same manner as her stage-set photographs, which lure the viewer with sensuous, almost voluptuous palettes and patterns, that reveal emotions with an ingenuous directness, Dream Soup bears witness to the historical importance of perfumes and scented oils in the UAE. The film, which follows the life cycle of a fragrance, it is far from mere reportage and focuses on playful elements such as the cliched names of fragrances. Al Qasimi worked with perfumes in Sharjah to develop unisex scents that are diffused into the room during the film. The artist composed the film’s soundtrack specifically for the video, which highlights the selection of perfume as a sensual and profoundly personal experience, further revealing how our choice of scents is linked to our desires and intended presentation of self.
In her installation, The Edifice of Sba, Belhamar juxtaposes the concepts of compressing time and prolonging visual memory from the perspective of a moving car. Rooted in the tradition of the moving image reminiscent of Bill Viola’s works, Belhamar contrasts painterly images of the shimmering mountain landscape against the sharp façade of the iconic Toyota building, one of Dubai’s first residential towers. Barely audible in the film is Khaliji music, typical of the Gulf region, which pays homage to time, as well as to personal and collective memory, while questioning the notion of afterimages and expressing how ephemeral human memories can be. Belhamar conveys this idea by experimenting with light and moving images that give her film a transcendent quality.
For Belhamar, belonging to the UAE is like ‘living in a time lapse;’ the passage of time and the sprawl of development are intensely surreal. ‘Next to the crowded industrial spectacle, the natural landscape has still kept its emptiness,’ she states. She began investigating the geological and cultural tectonics of her country, exploring the conflicting appearances of natural landscape and architecture. Belhamar’s work incorporates the conceptual metaphors of the medium and the perceptions of the ancient and modern, the Eastern and Western, which has informed her life.