We associate Ramadan with many things, though art shows are not usually one of them. Traditionally, the city’s artistic community goes into hibernation over the summer months – not so with the ever-creative Ghaf Gallery. While the shopping malls go consumer crazy, Ghaf Gallery’s Ramadan Art Bazaar promises an affordable art fair with a difference.
If parsimony is the defining characteristic of credit crunch UAE, that sentiment is well reflected here. Prominent Emirati artists Mattar Bin Lahej and Ghaf Gallery owner Jalal Luqman, alongside 20 others, will be exhibiting and selling their works at affordable prices – between Dhs50 and Dh3,000. ‘There isn’t a theme,’ Curator and exhibitor, Sumayyah Al Suwaidi, explains. ‘The point of having this exhibition is to give a chance for everyone to own a piece of art.’
Sumayyah is one of those artists looking to make a sale. Having exhibited in the UAE since 2003, her brand of digital art is now fairly familiar to Abu Dhabi’s art lovers. It is a medium both herself and her husband Jalal have worked in extensively. She refers to it as ‘painting’. ‘It’s exactly like having a pen and paper. The only difference is I work on a computer, so I don’t draw on myself, get paint on myself or get dirty when I’m done.’
Clinical, precise, but also haunting, there is a chilling quality to much of her work. ‘What I’m trying to get down to is that beauty is within,’ Sumayyah explains. Seemingly driven by a desire to take that beauty somewhere dark, her recent collection digitally bends and twists her models into exaggerated porcelain tragedies: glassy-eyed nymphs peering out of the near black, or framed within a romantic fantasy.
‘I have to be going through something. It’s particularly when I am going through a terrible time I produce my best work. When I was working on these pieces, it was during the pregnancy of my baby girl. I was going through hell. I ended up in the hospital three times; I wasn’t eating much; I was throwing up a lot. I think all the terror and horror I was going through came out in my paintings.’
Seemingly suspended in a state of gothic splendour, her works exist in a delicate balance between beauty and death. Typical of this period is ‘Laying in Sorrow’ (pictured right), a fantastical image of a woman seemingly materialising out of an indefinable haze. ‘She is lying in water in the original picture I was working on,’ Sumayyah explains. Through digital manipulation and by flipping the image vertically, the figure appears to be either emerging from something ethereal, or ultimately trapped in it like a fly in amber. ‘I wanted her to look like she was coming out of something terrible, something horrible. But people might say she is sleeping, others might say that she is leaving something beautiful. It depends on how they interpret the piece.’
This ambiguity runs deep in her work: grace and optimism tempered by a sense of unease. It is not simply that beauty isn’t skin deep – a hackneyed sentiment at best – but that the slightest exaggeration can push what is outwardly beautiful over the edge into something fearsome.
‘Before Death’ (pictured left) is another work to come out of this period. The pixie-like face and huge, hooded eyes are both enchanting and haunting. The wild hair breaks into strands of Arabic calligraphy, but that is the only discernable Middle Eastern influence. It is curious that a proud Emirati artist such as Sumayyah bends her work to foreign definitions of beauty – the women used in her pieces are defiantly Western looking. Why is this? ‘Most of the girls in my paintings don’t look Middle Eastern at all. We don’t meet. They are models who take photos of themselves and share them with the artists. You rarely find someone Middle Eastern who takes photos and poses like that.’
Essentially, these faces are her canvas; a blank, beautiful page upon which she may write in whatever language she chooses. Certainly, if Sumayyah’s work is anything to go by, the Ramadan Art Fair promises to be a much-needed light in an otherwise largely empty summer art calendar – even if, in her case, that light comes from a dark place.
Ramadan Art Bazaar runs at Ghaf Gallery (02 665 5332), Aug 23-Sep 7
