We Were Always Here: The Creative Source

In 2007, HH Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, unveiled plans for the Saadiyat Cultural District  – a whole series of museums, galleries and cultural spaces were proposed, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi (6) and arts spaces. The year also saw the first iteration of the art fair, Art Dubai, establishing the city as a marketplace for art from the region.  

     Eighteen years later and large parts of the plan for the Saadiyat Cultural District have come to fruition. The Louvre Abu Dhabi has opened and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is set to follow in 2025. In KSA, the cultural building boom is also under way. But the Gulf’s art scene did not emerge overnight. The foundations were laid by pioneers in the preceding decades. We asked our contributors about their earliest memories of art in the region along with seminal works and exhibitions that have shaped their own practice.

     Myrna Ayad remembers that in 2007, those who were flying the flag for the arts of the region came under regular attack at places such as Art Basel, “people were accusing us of buying culture, using our petrol dollars to fund the establishment of museums and galleries.” She goes on to say, “None of this is true, of course, because the Arab contribution to art and culture is enormous. But in all fairness, some would ask, who is our creative community? We did have pioneers, of course, such as the artist Hassan Sharif, and the government has been funding art scholarships since the 1970s (7), but did we have a lot of creatives at this time? Not so many.” 

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The Pioneers

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Hassan Sharif was a pioneer in contemporary art and a leader of a group of Emirati conceptual artists who staged artistic interventions from the 1970s onwards. He’s an example of artists in the region pioneering radical and original art, as he said ”Artists should not be afraid of the new. They should not be afraid to move away from heritage, away from notions of identity and national identity and away from nostalgia.” (8) Hassan was a founding member of the Emirates Fine Art Society started in 1980 in Sharjah.

     Following establishment of The Emirates Fine Art Society, the Sharjah Biennial was started in 1993 and has since become one of the most respected biennials on the global art calendar. Munira Al Sayegh is a curator who wants to reclaim and connect with the region’s artistic history. “My goal as independent curator is to really connect with the past as there has been so much growth and there are gaps and these need to be filled otherwise there is no sense of what has happened in our history,” she explains, “There are spaces that have been here since the 80s but why aren’t they deemed important? It is because they don’t fall under the standards of ‘Western excellence’ ”. 

     In Saudi Arabia, Safeya Binzagr was one of the first female artists to hold an exhibition in KSA. In 1995 she opened Darat Safeya Binzagr, the only cultural centre in Saudi at the time. 

     The artist collective Shatta, founded in the Meftaha Arts Village in 2002 by Ashraf Fayadh, Ahmed Mater, Abdulkarim Qassim, Abdulnasser Gharem and the poet, Muhammad Khidr – presented exhibitions and associated content that challenged ideas about what art could be. Their exhibitions marked the first opportunities to gauge the development of a Saudi contemporary art scene, supported by the critical mass of a younger generation.

     In KSA there has also been a dramatic recent rise in public investment in the arts, but the country’s arts scene hasn’t emerged from nowhere. Due to religious conservatism during the 1980s, KSA’s arts scene was largely underground. Rahel Aima explains that, “the UAE had contemporary art happening from the late eighties and through the nineties but it was relatively limited in scope the – recent boom was largely created from scratch – whereas Saudi’s boom was giving a platform to stuff that was really quite strong already, but just not in the public view.” (9)