UAE Pavilion

Courtesy the artist

Lamya Gargash, 2008

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

From its ambitious starchitect-designed complex of museums being built in Abu Dhabi, to the Sharjah Biennial and Dubai Art Fair, the United Arab Emirates has grown into a major player in contemporary art. The 38-year-old nation has been astoundingly good at funding and importing Western cultural models, but what about promoting and supporting its own? This year’s Venice Biennale marks the debut of the UAE Pavilion, organized by the Berlin-based critic and curator Tirdad Zolghadr, who cocurated the 2005 Sharjah Biennial. Placed prominently in the middle of the Arsenale, the exhibition features a solo show by Lamya Gargash, a 27-year-old Dubai-based photographer and filmmaker.

Lyra Kilston: By curating the first Venice pavilion for a country that, as you put it, is "in the midst of a spectacular act of national reinvention" you’re essentially signaling its "debut" onto the global art scene. High stakes. How did you begin?

Tirdad Zolghadr: I want to be self-reflexive about what an exhibition actually is. Despite the fact that promoting national identity is viewed very skeptically these days, I wanted to highlight that it’s a national pavilion, and not disguise the fact that a biennial with national pavilions comes out of the long history of the World Expos, where nations produced exhibitions and displays to market a certain facade to the world. I aim to do this in a very straightforward manner, by creating a pavilion that looks very much like a typical national space of presentation. There will be a solo show, plus a showroom of Emirati artists like Tarek Al-Ghoussein and Hassan Sharif, architectural models, and video projections of conversations among high-profile players of the UAE cultural scene who have helped build it up, from obvious suspects, like the collector Sultan Qasimi, to people who are off the beaten path, such as Mohamad Abdel Wahab, the composer of the national anthem.

LK: And what is the Emirati national anthem?

TZ: It’s very bouncy, with a marching rhythm. The lyrics present a typical pride of place, but the thing that stuck out to me were several lines devoted to sincerity — I liked that. [Work sincerely, work sincerely / As long as we live we will be sincere]

LK: Hasn’t the idea of a national pavilion been something that artists and curators at Venice have chosen to critique or obscure rather than celebrate?

TZ: Yes, like Hans Haacke’s German Pavilion in 1993.

LK: Right, where he jackhammered the marble floor into shards that visitors had to carefully walk over, with the word "Germania" chiseled onto a far wall. And this year, Germany is presenting a British artist, as if to say the whole nationality thing is over.

TZ: Then there was Santiago Sierra’s Spanish Pavilion in 2003, in which the entrance was bricked up and only visitors who held Spanish passports could enter.

LK: So, with this history of critiquing the national pavilions, does your decision to "unapologetically" embrace the tropes of World’s Fair display tactics poke fun at the outdated idea of a national pavilion?

TZ: No, not at all. I could have decided to install a bunch of fake palm trees, but ultimately I hope to present the pavilion in a manner that will hopefully be neither glamorizing nor satirical.

LK: A hard balance to strike.

TZ: Yes.

LK: Let’s talk about the title of the Pavilion: "It’s Not You, It’s Me."

TZ: It addresses the condition of being the newcomer to the Biennale, and therefore being somewhat on the defensive. The term is a cliché used to end a relationship, and is a kind of catchall easy way out, yet is rarely true. This ambivalence is something I was interested in. I was looking for a phrase that would speak to the ambivalence of the UAE being in the Biennale at all, and to speculations like: Why are they here? Why do they have this huge space right in the middle? What shady dealings occurred?

LK: How did you first come across the work of Lamya Gargash, and why did you decide to select her for the main exhibition?