Art Paper #03

Paintings and quotations by Etel Adnan. Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery and the artist.

At the top of the poster shown above is an untitled painting, real size 35 x 45cm, made sometime between 1995 and the year 2000. It’s by Etel Adnan: essayist, novelist, journalist, poet, playwrite, painter, videographer and tapestry designer; philosophy graduate of the Sorbonne, Berkeley and Harvard; child of Beirut, born in 1925 to a Greek mother and Syrian father; and 89-year-old resident of Sausalito, California. She is currently being celebrated at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art with the retrospective show Etel Adnan in All Her Dimensions, curated by superstar Hans Ulrich Obrist. We wanted to show her paintings as large as our print space would allow, in the form of a poster that can be pulled out and kept. And we felt we had to quote from some of her writings that relate to her paintings, as she is so erudite and uplifting on the subject. Inside the back cover are sections from the first of her many manuscripts, a painted version of the Arabic poem Madinat Al Sindbad, by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, reproduced my Mathaf for their current show. Obrist is fond of saying that Adnan should be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, according to Adnan’s gallerist Andrée Sfeir-Semler. The Nobel Prize has been awarded to women 45 times, out of 561 given in total; perhaps Adnan could raise it to 46.

[This text is an extract from What's Inside, the opening page of the Art Paper #03]

CITY NEWS PUBLISHING AT ART DUBAI

Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2012, 138.4 x 138.4 x 31.1 cm,

Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York

Editor-in-chief of Selections and founder of City News Publishing Rima Nasser was in the Emirates last week for Art Dubai. This cultural and commercial highlight in the Gulf welcomed 70 galleries and 70 museum groups through its doors this year and spent a remarkable $45 million putting together the show. We were pleased to find that out of the 500 artists exhibiting, 50% were women; as Abellah Karroum, director of Mathaf, writes in his accompanying letter to the pages he curated for us in the latest issue of Selections, "After making the selection, I realised that just half of the artworks I included were created by men, underscoring the extent to which gender equality is crucial to the progress of art and society".

Huguette Caland, Rossinante Under Cover XI, 2011,132 x 104 cm, 

Courtesy of the artist and Lombard 

During the press tour of the fair, director Antonia Carver settled upon Anish Kapoor and Mona Hatoum as the artists exhibiting the most important works there, while Rima herself most appreciated Huguette Caland's pieces, being exhibited by Galerie Janine Rubeiz, as well as Anup Mathew Thomas's photographic portrait series of women from Kerala, India, working as nurses around the world. 

Reza Hezare, Drawing Collection - In Exile, 2008, 86 x 62 cm,

Courtesy of YAY Gallery

Rajaa Khalid, 1951-64, The Big Picture, 

Global Art Forum 8 Commission, Art Dubai 2014

Artist collective Slavs and Tatars did an excellent job of curating the Marker section (read our interview with them in the current issue of the Art Paper) - with the drawings of Reza Hezare at YAY Gallery standing out in particular here - and the Global Art Forum brought some of the brightest voices together to debate and discuss art in our region (look out for coverage in the next Art Paper).

MEET MIRIAM LLOYD-EVANS

Miriam with Abdulnasser Gharem and the 

book they worked on together

Miriam Lloyd-Evans writes for Selections and the Art Paper about contemporary Arab art. Her main occupation, however, is curating art from the Middle East. Working between London and the Gulf, she often partners with galleries in the region and has been instrumental in several landmark exhibitions by emerging Middle Eastern artists in Venice, Berlin, Istanbul, Dubai and London. Miriam recently took up the position of Lead Curator: International Engagement Team (Middle East) at the British Museum, having previously worked with innovative platform Edge of Arabia. She has closely collaborated with well-known Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem and edited his monograph. When she's not working the museums, art fairs and auction house circuit, Miriam lets off steam by dancing at parties and sailing around the Mediterranean.