Art Dubai overlapped with the ninth annual Sharjah Biennial, which runs from March 19 through May 16 at the Sharjah Art Museum and other venues in the happening’s namesake city. The biennial’s artistic director, Jack Persekian, a Palestinian curator who oversees the Al-Ma’mal Foundation, in Jerusalem, has placed a particular emphasis on supporting local artists and encouraging process over product. The Italian conceptualist Alberto Duman contributed Decoder, 2009, a tower of inverted shopping carts inspired by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealized 1919 Monument to the Third International. With its echoes of the Louvre’s and the Guggenheim Museum’s unfinished projects in Abu Dhabi, Duman’s piece offers a searing critique of consumerism, as well as of the country’s unbridled ambitions to become the cultural hub of the Middle East. Its message may have resonated with gallerists at Art Dubai.

"All Dried Up?" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.