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March 30, 2012 1 3

Collectors’ edition

Samawi Collection II is an exhi-bition that offers art lovers a rare opportunity to enjoy mu-seum-quality, cutting-edge art-works from a private collection. it features a selection of instal-

lations, photographic and video art from the collection of Dubai-based collectors and gallerists Khalid Samawi and hesham Samawi. the artworks, by emerging and established artists from the region and from France, the netherlands, the United Kingdom, Korea, Russia and the United States, provide a comprehensive look at the interesting and exciting developments in contemporary photography and concep-tual art. the Samawis have also published a catalogue documenting the show, which is available free to all visitors.

the Samawi cousins, who are from Syria, are the owners of the Ayyam Art Centre in Dubai and Ayyam galleries in Dubai, Damascus and beirut that nurture and promote upcoming and established art-ists from this region through exhibitions, residencies, publications, art auctions and the Shabab Ayyam Project. they believe in sharing their collection with art lovers through public exhibitions. their inaugural exhibition last year featured 50 paintings by Arab artists, offering an overview of the history and evolution of contemporary Arab art. this show, featuring new media and technology and international artists, presents another aspect of their collection.

“We buy art that inspires and moves us.

Although our galleries exclusively promote Middle eastern art, we appreciate and col-lect art from around the world. the three rules we follow while buying art are — buy what we love and feel proud to own; buy only what we can afford; and buy from a respected gallery or artist. We exhibit our collection because we feel there is no point in having artworks if we do not share them. And we document and archive the art-works and distribute the catalogue for free to educate people,” hesham says.

the artworks in this show include work by leading names such as newsha tavako-lian, Sadegh tirafkan, Meera huraiz, halim Al Karim, Shirin neshat, Richard Mosse, Philipe Dudouit, Sama Al Shaibi, brad Downey, Sadik Al Fraji, Matthew Carver, tammam Azam and huguette Caland. the

themes include gender issues, suppression in society, the effects of war, the transmis-sion and loss of culture, and the influence of media on modern society.

the highlights include several thought-provoking installations. MAD: A Happy Explosion — by Lebanese artists Rima Chahrour and Michel Ayoub, featuring smiling, deformed figures in the back of an exploded car is a cynical comment on the madness of rebellions. Syrian artist thaer Marouf’s headless figure in Missing Iden-tity questions the validity, symbolism and the meaning of a national identity. Amal Kenawy from egypt explores the journey of a girl to womanhood and the forces that tie her down through an installation of legs amputated at the knee and decorated with butterflies and bows.

other pieces that stand out include works by two South Korean artists. Seon Ghi bahk’s Existence Stairs is a staircase and frame composed of charcoal pieces suspended on translucent nylon fibres that refers to the various stages of life. And Chul-hyun Ahn’s Void Platfrom uses opti-cal illusion to create an abyss in the gallery floor to explore the gap between the con-scious and subconscious.

Among the striking photographic works is a picture of Queen elizabeth, captured by Syrian photojournalist Ammar Abd Rabbo; works from Lebanese artist Rania Matar’s iconic A Girl in Her Room series, looking at the private spaces of teenage girls in the US and the Arab world; and several works from Saudi Arabian artist Manal Al Doway-an’s well known I Am series, exploring the aspirations and fears of Saudi women.

Another engaging and entertaining work is American artist Gregory Scott’s video installation At The Beach. it combines tra-ditional oil painting, hD video and archival digital printing to create illusion and takes viewers on a witty investigation of percep-tion and human conditions of play, desire, identity and melancholy.

but perhaps the work that defines this show is Syrian artist Ammar Al beik’s in-stallation Coloured Earth, which questions the definition of art by drawing parallels between modern art and the work of arti-sans who paint houses.

Jyoti Kalsi is an arts-enthusiast based in Dubai.

Samawi Collection II will run at the Ayyam Art Centre, Al Quoz, until April 26.

By Jyoti Kalsi Special to Weekend Review The Samawi cousins offer viewers a peek into

the minds of artists they have grown to love

James Clar’s ‘Got Recession’ A piece from Oleg Dou Ronald’s ‘Toy Series’

An untitled work by Halim Al Karim

A break in the pattern

Two artists use different media to explore the common theme of ornamentation, and the

lack of it, in art and architecture

the conflicted relationship between the decorative tradition of ornament and Western Modernism is the theme of Brute Ornament, a show featuring latest works

by new York-based artists Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah.

Aram, who is of iranian origin, uses Per-sian motifs in his paintings to re-examine the way we look at ornamental art. Shah, who was born in Pakistan, draws on her training as an architect to contemplate the lost ideals of brutalist architecture that is devoid of ornament. the show is curated by Murtaza Vali.

in his earlier work, Aram has used vari-ous icons inspired by his iranian heritage, but in this new work he has moved from iconography towards an iconoclastic ap-proach. Although he has used floral pat-terns from Persian carpets, in many places the artist has wiped out the motifs from the canvas or covered them with black paint — and then repainted them.

“in this work, the process itself reflects the meaning. When a pattern is repeated it becomes ornamental, but here the idea is to brutalise ornamentation,” Aram says.

“these paintings are in a state of being built and destroyed and rebuilt. hence, the

floral pattern is interrupted and it is strug-gling to become a repetitive pattern, which could be called ornamental. the conflict-ed situation in which the ornaments are placed, reflects the rela-tionship between orna-ment and pure abstrac-tion,” Aram adds.

he has also used geo-metric shapes — such as triangles and red dots — in his work as refer-ences to the spirituality in islamic art, the history of modern geometric art and the role of ornament in the development of mod-ern art in the West.

“the patterns of Persian carpets, especially the me-dallion carpet, represent different stages of spiritu-al development. hence the Persian carpet is not just a decorative object. Like a mod-ern painting, it is a work of art that has a deeper meaning. by bringing these two art forms together in my work, i want to create something meaningful that references the carpet and is a painting,” he says.

the artist uses references to modern-ists such as Frank Stella, Paul Klee and Cy twombly to question perceptions about decorative and modern art. And some of the titles such as Backdrop for an Anxious Interior also reveal his own inner conflicts.

“For many years i struggled against the idea of my work being beautiful because i was cautious about it becoming decora-tive. but now i realise that for an artwork to have critical content it has to accept part of its role as decorative. by imposing carpet

patterns on Frank Stella’s ‘black paintings’ i want to question the false understanding that one is decorative and the other art, and state that both are decorative and meaning-ful,” he says.

While Aram negotiates the complicated space between two art traditions, Shah’s work is all about investigating personal spaces. her mystical graphite drawings feature a series of turbulent, fantasy land-scapes that combine architectural drawings of real buildings with imaginary cityscapes, free-standing columns and walls, vector lines, cloudy vistas, swirling arabesques

and other ornament. the centrepiece of this

series is Object Relic, based on the Unite d’habitation, Le Corbusier’s iconic building developed in the 1950s as a prototype for social housing.

“this new brutalist architecture, devoid of ornament, started out as low-income housing for the masses, and this building became the in-spiration for social hous-ing projects around the world,” Shah says.

the artist, however, adds that these cold, inhuman structures have mostly resulted in the marginalisation of the people inhabiting them. in essence, the structure failed to realise Corbusier’s original vision. Shah also says that what she finds in-teresting is that this rectangular block — the building — which is quite disconnected from the landscape, is very Utopian in its ideals, but fails on these ideals because it disregards the idea of the individual.

“in my drawing,” Shah says, “i have flat-tened out the Unite building, stretched

it out in perspective and situated it in an imaginary landscape to look at the iconic modern structure as a ruin or relic.”

the complex patterns of geometric shapes in this drawing are broken by strings of flag-like shapes inspired by prayer flags in monasteries, and a huge black wall stand-ing in the middle.

“the flags represent ornament and in-dividuality and also allow me to intro-duce movement into the rigid architec-tural grid. Whereas, the black wall, which erases part of the drawing, is a means of separation that represents the rigid au-thoritarian nature of brutalist structures and the inherent anxiety that exists be-tween the organic and structural nature of the grid,” Shah says.

in other drawings, she plays with the modular system of the Unite building and other architectural perspectives — turning and bending the walls, constructing, de-constructing and reorienting them and ob-literating vistas, setting and breaking down controls on viewing perspectives through dark monolithic walls, columns, gates and grids to convey ideas of repetition, trans-formation and tension.

“For me the premise of Brute Ornament is about examining the vexed relationship between the idea of decorative styles ver-sus brutalist architecture that strips away any idea of ornament. And i see a dialogue between my work and Aram’s in the sense of the idea of anxiety about how art gets categorised and the idea of reinterpret-ing historical context either by erasing or changing perspectives,” she adds.

Brute Ornament will run at Green Art Gallery until May 5.

By Jyoti Kalsi Special to Weekend Review

Far left: Kamrooz Aram’s ‘Angelus Novus (Reconstructed)’, 2011

Left: Aram’s ‘Backdrop for an Anxious Interior’, 2012

Above: Seher Shah’s ‘Object Relic (Unite d’ Habitation)’, 2011

For many years I struggled against the idea of my work being beautiful because I was cautious about it becoming decorative.— Kamrooz Aram