I am the lucky recipient of a fellowship from New York University Abu Dhabi’s project Forming Intersections in Dialogue, or FIND. From March to June 2014 I’ll perform a research together with UAE-based scholars and artists from the Gulf region. The object of research is the conspicuous absence of the great pre-Islamic civilizations of the Arabian Peninsula in contemporary culture.
View of the ancient city of Najran (al Ukhdood). Photographed by the author, March 2014
How can artists and other creative minds establish links between ancient and contemporary Arabia? The objective is of course not to establish a historical narrative linking both. My critical take on history is precisely adverse to such narratives. To the contrary, the point is to experiment with the freedom of establishing one’s own personal historical narratives. The lack of a coherent ‘grand narrative’ covering this period of human history is a great opportunity.
This research project is double-edged. On the one hand, there’s my research assistant Amal Bssiss, and the scholars based in the UAE who have eagerly joined the project. Here the objective is to uncover interesting stories, fragments not only of the past but also of how that past is dealt with today. This material is put online, on our Flickr page, on our Facebook page, and on our Tumblr blog. The idea is to share it as broadly as possible, to inspire artists.
On the other hand, I’m exploring different innovative approaches of how to deal with history; as an artist, but also as the creative thinker I am myself. In my series of exhibitions ‘Crisis of History‘, which I’m planning and realizing simultaneously to Searching for Ancient Arabia, I try to deconstruct the role of history in our current Western society by exploring artistic strategies to reveal, fight and surpass the behemoth of History. Searching for Ancient Arabia allows the artists and myself a relatively free scope to experiment with personal relations to the past, as History hasn’t invaded this part of humankind’s past.
These reflections will also be spun online, on the project’s blog. But they will also provide the organizing principle for the Museum of Contemporary Ancient Arabia, an online exhibition project which will be the result of this project, and which is prepared with FIND’s fantastic web-design team.
On a more practical level, the research project will involve two research trips: one to Bahrain from 8 to 11 April, and one to Oman in the second half of May. These research trips will be made in the company of artists and scholars from the UAE and the region. The artists will be selected on the basis of their submissions: what they hope to make of the trip, with a special attention to their approach. Hopefully some of these projects will be of sufficient quality to show in the Museum of Contemporary Ancient Arabia.
These calls for proposals and all other information will be placed on our blog and our FB page, so if you want to stay tuned in, subscribe to them!
(left:) Nabataean god-stone,1st C AD and (right:) head of a Lihyanite sandstone statue from Dedan,7th to 4th century BC.