Leaving a busy November behind, including visiting Cairo for Art d' Egypte memorable Night at the Museum and then Abu Dhabi for the fair and the unforgettable opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, this month we are looking forward to Bahrain Art Week in London, which runs from 7 - 12th December including an exhibition we are proud to have curated of 15 Bahraini artists at the Saatchi Gallery , a panel discussion and tribute to the late Ahmed Baqer.  Click here to receive more details. 

 

If you haven't already visited JRFA artist Bijan Daneshmand's INFINITE TRUTHS exhibition, do take time to go before it finishes on 8th December (see installation shot above).  

Lastly we wish everyone a happy holiday season and look forward to catching up again with you again in the New Year.

Janet Rady, Gallery Director and Curator

This exhibition brings together four principal art forms-lacquer, lithography, photography, and painting and drawing on paper-to explore their separate and intertwined histories, contexts of production, and means of dissemination across sectors of society ranging from the courtly elite to the citizenry at large. The almost 80 works in the exhibition, most of which have never before been exhibited, include illustrated books, album folios, pen boxes, mirror cases, single-sheet painted and printed images, and photographs.

Jumana Manna makes films and sculptures that explore the ways in which social, political, and interpersonal forms of power, interact with the human body. Her films weave together fact and fiction, biographical and archival materials, to investigate constructions of national and historical narratives. Her sculptures, more abstract by comparison, take interest in the calcifications of memory, as represented by the artefact real or forged.

"The exhibition "Tony Cragg: Roots & Stones" gives an extensive insight into the sculptural and graphic work of the artist living in Wuppertal. Tony Cragg was the first British artist invited to Iran for holding an exhibition of his works: this is a symbol of hope. The exhibition links a connection between the West and Iran beyond diplomatic difficulties." Persia Digest

The stories of cities like London, Tunis, Dallas, Berlin and now Bonn are the starting point for the development of Nadia Kaabi-Linke's artworks. Part of the developing progress of her work is the search for a city's traces which the artist regards not only as signs of everyday life, but mostly as concrete pictures of political-geographic conditions and their impact on us humans. Kaabi-Linke examines these traces and pictures closely, interprets them and eventually transforms them into art.

In the making for several years, this landmark retrospective will include Hassan Sharif's diverse body of work from the early 1970s to 2016. On view in Al Mureijah Square and Bait Al Serkal, Arts Square, the exhibition will encompass Sharif's early newspaper caricature and comic strip drawings, 'semi-system' works, performances, paintings and 'urban archeology' objects.

"What we see in the sculptures of Safaa El Set , in her "Death dwells near Me" exhibition, are not skeletons of extinct animals; we see an unborn life, an abortive dream, and incomplete remains. These bones represent a collection of sculptures portraying unknown creatures, just like other species that we are familiar with, that we read about and have ever seen. However, the truth we are faced with is a witty mixture, through which Safaa Al-Set has thrived in her previous exhibitions, and through which she continually explores..."

The exhibition intends to put forward some of the most important trends of creative explorations of the contemporary reality intensively incarnated in the city's development and destiny. It will present some 36 artists, architects, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, researchers, activists with their diverse forms of expressions negotiating between critical reflections of recent history of conflicts, through archiving and re-enacting memories, and prospections of the future, through attempts of urban transformation and global outreaching, periodically interrupted by urgent problems and frustrations of the present.

The artistic work of Iman Issa (*1979 in Cairo, EGY, lives in New York, USA) deals with the possibilities of association and individual experience. Through installation, sculpture, photography and text the artist investigates how history, language and objects, in particular, relate together. In her ongoing studies, Issa employs a range of forms, materials and strategies, in order to, on the one hand, deconstruct things in their essence, and on the other, to make missing subtexts, concepts and narratives visible.

The MdbK exhibition "Displacements/ Entortungen" initiates a dialogue between the oeuvre of the two internationally renowned artists Ayse Erkmen (Istanbul) and Mona Hatoum (Beirut) in an unprecedented joint exhibition. Both Erkmen's and Hatoum's artistic vantage point is their reflection about the specifics of a place, and the connected questions of politics and society.

Photographic objects have been the centre of Akram Zaatari's (born in Saida/Lebanon in 1966, lives and works in Beirut) artistic practice since 1995. Photographic formations or emergences, as he calls them, are the focus of this exhibition: enigmatic objects that bear traces of past events and accompany people through key moments in their lives. Cherished at times, destroyed at others, photographs are capable of provoking diverse and extreme reactions. Initially, capturing instances, they change over time. The perception of an image changes, but sometimes the physicality of the object itself is also altered as a result of its contact with the natural, social and political environment.

The exhibition is based on a rigorous research activity resulting from unprecedented institutional collaboration between the Madre and the Archaeological Park / Pompeii Superintendence, the most important archaeological Italian site and one of the most visited worldwide. Based on a comparison and discussion of respective research methodologies, disciplinary fields and collections, Pompei@Madre. Materia Archeologica consists in studying the potential multiple relationships between archaeological heritage and artistic research, creating a dialogue between extraordinary but little-known and rarely displayed archaeological material from Pompeii and modern and contemporary artworks.

Conceived as multi-sited, Three Crossings brings together works of three artists, each installed in a different Amsterdam venue. The exhibition foregrounds each artist's experimentation with the genre of the "artist's book" yet also includes, in the cases of El Salahi and Brouwn, other relevant pieces that broaden our appreciation of their work. The selected works are for the most part small in scale and minimalist in form, yet they speak volumes of the artists' criticality, sharpness and innovation, rarely matched among their contemporaries and peers. Additional Link

The exhibition focuses primarily on the different ways in which the human figure has been used in Islamic art, from an ornament and symbol to scientific diagrams, narrative illustrations, and independent paintings or drawings. The exhibition's works of art were mainly made for the highest social strata in the Muslim world, and a dominant theme is "The Prince and the Court," which features both actual portraits of rulers and depictions of the princes' public and more relaxed, private life.

Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys takes visitors through the holiest city in the Islamic world. It presents a compelling portrait of the massive urban redevelopment now under way and its effects on residents and the millions of hajj pilgrims who travel there every year. Saudi artist Ahmed Mater has documented this unprecedented expansion for nearly a decade.

The first edition of Video Diaries, with videos by Heba Y. Amin, Ziad Antar and Raed Yassin that meld personal pasts and absurd realities with elements of popular culture to subtly, or directly, address the political and the banal. A charming, young musical duo, a stork with questionable intentions and a disco-lover determined to reach stardom, all take the lead in this program of fiction and unfortunate facts.

Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective is structured across five chapters: from his early experiments in painting in Karachi in the 1950s and early 60s, his pioneering minimalist sculptures carried out after his arrival in London in 1964, key pieces from the 70s and 80s following Araeen's political awakening, his nine panel cruciform works from the 80s and 90s and a selection of his new geometric paintings and wall structures.

Considered the founding father of Iraqi photography, Ali Ani was prolific in documenting everyday life in the country, from the 1950s to the 1970s. His photographs provide a unique record of mid-20th century Iraqi experience. By the 1980s his work had fallen into obscurity and it is only recently that the artist has been rediscovered by an international audience. In 2015 his work was featured in the Iraq Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and earlier this year Hatje Cantz published the first monograph of the artist's work, which won the Historical Book Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles 2017.

Borrowing its title from a poem by the Egyptian artist Anna Boghiguian, From Ear to Ear to Eye explores the acoustic lives of different cities and places across the Arab world. The exhibition considers the different ways in which notation and recording are used to map memories and migration, territories and conflict. It is about sounds travelling across borders, or being used to define them. It is about that which might be voiced or heard, but resists being visualised.