Jack Persekian | Saadiyat [The National]
On Sunday, the capital’s nascent arts district will spark into life with its first exhibition, a survey of Arab contemporary art featuring some of the most eminent names on the modern scene.
So far only one art space, the Manarat al Saadiyat, is ready for use on the island: the rest are a maze of foundations. But at more or less two-year intervals, that first site will be joined by a branch of NYU, then a Louvre, then the world’s largest Guggenheim museum, designed by Frank Gehry. After that, a performance space designed by Zaha Hadid is planned.
Abu Dhabi’s claim to the cultural crown of the Middle East begins in earnest here, with Jack Persekian’s Disorientation II exhibition. It is, one might think, a moment of pure exultation. And one would be wrong.
“No, it’s not a utopian gesture,” Persekian says sharply. “Even from its title, Disorientation, I tried to take a very sombre look, as I said, on the situation we live in.”
Persekian is best known in the UAE as the artistic director of the Sharjah Biennial, where he has played a major role since 2007. His sombre outlook, however, seems more closely connected with the other world he inhabits as a curator in his hometown of Jerusalem. Whatever else it might be, Israel is no breeding ground for political Panglosses, and so the first exhibition to take place in the cavernous Manarat al Saadiyat, titled Disorientation II (it follows the show Persekian staged in Berlin six years ago), sets out to highlight the failures of solidarity that have bedevilled the Arab world for the past 40 years.
“It’s based on the idea of juxtaposing two eras, two periods of time,” Persekian says. “I took the 1960s and 1970s as a moment when the Arab world – in terms, of course, of visual representation – had some kind of utopian or quasi-utopian outlook on possibilities of Arab unity and the idea of Arab nationalism.”
The central figure in this vision is Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late Egyptian president who, for a few years in the late 1950s, united Egypt and Syria in the short-lived United Arab Republic. “He was leading that clan to unify the Arabs,” Persekian says wistfully.
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And perhaps the very fact of Saadiyat Island’s arrival ought to inspire optimism, at least among Arab artists.
“I thought about this the other day,” Persekian says. “A friend of mine called me and said: ‘Jack, Guggenheim New York bought one of my pieces and it’s now in the collection’.”
Other artists came to the curator with similar stories. “It’s like, wow, what’s happening? All of a sudden the western world, let’s call it the centre of the contemporary art movement, all of a sudden is interested in buying and taking these artists into the main collections there. So there’s definitely a change in the attitudes.”
The cause, in Persekian’s view, is simple: Saadiyat. “It is such a magnet, and drew so much attention,” he says. “Saadiyat brought about such a tremendous polarity in terms of attracting or turning the attention of a lot of people to this part of the world, that the whole art movement and artists are now enjoying a much higher profile.”
This, surely, might offer grounds for a more optimistic survey of the Arab scene? Maybe next year. “We would be able to talk to artists, have discussions about issues with them, issues of concern,” Persekian says musingly. “And maybe look for possibilities of hope, look for possibilities of a more positive outlook on the future…”
He checks himself. “If that is possible, of course,” he adds.
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