Art Dubai returned March 11-13 with the fair’s most extensive edition to date, bringing together more than 100 galleries from 44 countries, including more than 30 first-time attendees.
The global art scene had to adapt after two years of pandemics and blockades, leading to a new trend in the limelight at this year’s Art Dubai.
Now in the 15th edition, Art Dubai is an international showcase of contemporary and modern art with a special focus on Middle Eastern and Asian art, bringing together galleries and artists from around the world.
This year’s show featured the debut of the Art Dubai Digital Pavilion. The pavilion exhibited digital native art, video, virtual reality, 3D and NFT platforms from around the world.
Dubai is rapidly becoming a new hub for crypto investors and influential people. Last year, several new cryptocurrency centers were opened. This includes the state-owned Dubai Multicommodity Center, which is expected to enroll more than 1,000 crypto businesses this year alone at the Future Blockchain Summit in October 2021.
In light of this, the organizers of Art Dubai felt it was important to give due consideration to this new field of art.
Pablo del Val, Creative Director of Art Dubai, told Almonitor: “”[We are] Invite galleries from the real world starting things digitally, or galleries with departments dedicated to working with NFT artists, and galleries that exist [solely] In the Metaverse. “
“”[At first] We were wondering [if] It makes sense to do something physical with something virtual, but I think it has lived in a very nice and logical way, “he explained. “We are trying to understand and learn the physical world through our educational program. At the same time, all these people from the Metaverse are being validated by educational institutions.”
Digital art isn’t new, but dates back to the 1980s with pioneers like Harold Cohen, but digital artists have historically been overlooked or dismissed as enthusiasts by the mainstream art community. Although many have shared artwork online for years, the lack of regulation and structure behind the work discourages potential buyers accustomed to working with physical art objects. I did.
With the advent of technologies such as Blockchain and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), it has become easier for artists to sell their certification of possession of works backed by an online ledger, making it easier to sell digital art. As a result, NFTs have become a popular speculative asset for crypto investors, attracting new buyers to the art market and creating new opportunities for artists to find their audience.
“The NFT scene is very new and the original collector came from Crypto-Twitter, so all these people, [traditional] It’s an art scene, but they can decide what the culture is, “Shavonne Wong, a digital artist who is part of NFT Asia, told Al-Monitor.
“Everything is very different [and it] All these new people are very exciting [and] New artists will show you something that isn’t in the museum. “
“Digital art has been around for decades,” Jenn Ellis, co-creator of the digital art space AORA, told Al-Monitor. “”[As] We, millennials, are more digitally and clearly represented than our parents. It involves certain skills. If you think of art as an empathetic and important medium for communicating on a topic, why does digital mean it’s not one of the other pens in the pencil case? This is just another tool. “
Like last year, diversity was a big trend at this year’s fair. More than half of Art Dubai 2022’s entire gallery program consisted of artists and galleries from the Global North and Global South. This is deliberately out of the focus of the more typical European Americans of most major art fairs.
“The good thing about Art Dubai is that it drives things early,” Ayyam Gallery’s managing partner Ead Samawi told Al-Monitor. “It takes less than 40 years to start showing something once it’s established. You can see what’s really happening in different regions. [as it] It is appearing. “
“When they come here, they see what they don’t see at home, because we bring energy that isn’t too close to traditional Western culture,” Del Val echoed. “There is a life beyond the West. It’s shocking to those who come here. They completely get out of the comfort zone and accept it.”
This is most noticeable in the Bawaba (Gateway) showcase in Art Dubai. This showcase returns for the second time this year and has been exhibited in various media by individual artists from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Angola, Peru, Chile and Mexico. These are all new works created within the last year, and some are specially created for ArtDubai 2022.
“The point of Bawaba is not to stick to modeling around the center, but to privilege offsite of global contemporary art,” curator Nancy Adajania told Almonitor. “It is through dialogue that we can achieve such diverse media and powerful presentations.”
Mexican artist Rodrigo Hernandez has meticulously created a work made entirely from brass sheets that have been hammered by hand. The contrast between a person and his surroundings, such as an astronaut depicted holding a cat, highlights both the desire and need for contact and dating.
In contrast, Indian artist Soghra Khurasani used wooden blocks to scratch and scrape the surface to create a memorable landscape. The violence of her technique reflects her deep personal distress and her isolation and frustration of being a Muslim woman in a Hindu-dominated country. This is in contrast to the quiet peace of the prints she creates from the blocks.
“These are works that work with specific location materials and resources,” explains Adajania. “It is possible to have a very powerful, diagonal political comment, but at the same time a very tactile, tactile, aesthetically defined work. This idea of various cultural resources. , How they intersect and blend into the artist’s work to create new conversations. “
