“Remember: Empty the storage. Ideally everything should be on display.”
These are the words I told Barjeel Art Foundation director Karim Sultan when he joined us in early 2016. Since then, Barjeel has escalated its already active loans and exhibitions programs. In April 2016, the Barjeel collection exhibition displayed more than 100 works in “The Short Century” at the Sharjah Art Museum, including Hamed Ewais’s allegorical canvas Protector of Life (1967–68), Marwan’s tempera painting Head (1975–76) and Saloua Raouda Choucair’s abstract Composition in Yellow (1962–65).
In late 2016, we opened the very first modern Arab art exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, where 40 works from Barjeel were paired with 40 works from the Iranian museum’s collection in what was a coup of cultural diplomacy. A few weeks later, an exhibition opened at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina celebrating the art of Hurufism (Lettrism) to coincide with our publication Arabic Hurufiyya Art and Identity. Overall, 2017 was the busiest year yet with shows at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center in Washington, DC.
Back when the Foundation was established in 2010 there was no articulated plan to loan works, as Barjeel had traditionally organized shows at its 475-square-meter space in the al-Qasba district in Sharjah. A few years after our opening, however, we began to be approached for individual loans from the likes of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp in Belgium (for “Narcisse Tordoir: the Pink Spy”) and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (“Arab Express: the Latest Art from the Arab World”). In 2012, the Singapore Art Museum approached us and together we held “Terms and Conditions,” curated by Mandy Merzaban, a logistically monumental show that included works from both the collection and various regional institutions. In 2014 we mounted “Sky Over the East: Works from the Collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation,” curated by Suheyla Takesh, in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation, and in 2015, “Home Ground: Contemporary Art from the Barjeel Art Foundation” opened at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. However, Barjeel’s tipping point was no doubt our most ambitious project yet. “Imperfect Chronology,” curated by Omar Kholeif, now Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, was held over a period of 16 months at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. That exhibition—which attracted more than 330,000 visitors—would help raise awareness about Barjeel’s activities. Before we knew it, global institutions and museums including Yale University Art Gallery contacted us to borrow works and organize exhibitions.
The reason we are readily willing to loan works is that we view art as an essential and often overlooked element in the dialogue of civilizations. This dialogue need not only take place between East and West and North and South, but we realized it is often needed the most within regions themselves—hence our exhibition in Iran at a time of heightened regional political tensions.
What we have learned on this journey is manifold. First, we learned that there is a great deal of interest in art from the Middle East (our Singapore and Toronto shows attracted close to 60,000 visitors each). Second, we learned that despite sometimes sharing costs these shows can be very expensive as they involve logistics, publications and insurance as well as costs associated with the educational programs that are held alongside the exhibition. Unfortunately, and although we at Barjeel operate on a strictly nonprofit basis, we are unable to obtain a nonprofit license to offset these costs because of UAE bureaucracy, which almost only grants them to government-affiliated organizations. Thus, eight years on, we continue to operate under a commercial license, which denies us the opportunity to apply for international funding. So far Barjeel has been purely funded from my inheritance and private business enterprises—by no means a long-term, sustainable approach. Third, we realized that orientalist attitudes are still prevalent in the art world. We have noticed a repeated insistence on comparing Middle Eastern artists to Westerns ones; “the (insert name of European/American artist) of the Arab world” is a phrase we often encountered. Furthermore, certain journalists from reputable publications who covered some of our shows didn’t even bother contacting us for information. Others questioned the logic of organizing an exhibition from a single collection; such concerns would likely not arise around a show from François Pinault’s or Bernard Arnault’s collections, for instance.
Despite these challenges, we have persevered. What the Arab world needs now more than ever are more cultural foundations to document and archive, preserve and display, safeguard and share our culture that is under threat from dark forces. Since the turn of this century, museums in Iraq were at first looted under the negligence of American occupiers and then destroyed by terrorist criminal gangs. Conflict has touched every corner of the Arab world from Algeria to Yemen, including Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Among the many responses to conflict is more education and more emphasis on culture and art. We have to instill a sense of pride in young Arabs in their own culture including movies, music, theater and certainly the fine arts. In order to avoid falling into the same trappings of orientalism, our own points of reference must include Mahmoud Saïd as well as Picasso, Etel Adnan as well as Frida Kahlo and Dia al-Azzawi as well as FN Souza and Amrita Sher-Gil.
Over the past few years, Barjeel has produced a dozen international exhibitions and an equal number of publications in English and Arabic. Going forward, our plan would be to reach an arrangement with a museum, either regionally or internationally, for the works to be on long-term display for the public to enjoy, learn about and hopefully gain a deeper understanding of the Arab world.
This article originally appeared in ArtAsiaPacific Almanac 2018 on January 4, 2018 (screenshot). A PDF of the original can be downloaded here.
