08 January 2008

Review

DUBAI: Whether as object or subject, the female form has been central to visual art for as long as representational art has been attempted. Four variations on this ever-mutable theme can be found in "Life Drawing: Approaches to Figurative Practice," a mixed-media exhibition currently on view at the Third Line in Dubai.

The show features the work of four young artists, all women with roots in the Gulf. The vast majority of this work is interested in women, rendered in media ranging from video to paint on canvas to ink on paper. Easy comparisons end there.

In a game of free association, the words "women" and "the Middle East" (or "Muslim world," if you prefer) often evoke practices like honor crimes and rape, clitoridectomy, nonconsensual marriage and systemic illiteracy, which are perceived as more or less commonplace, if not socially sanctioned.

Some of the works in "Life Drawing" engage in a visual rhetoric that challenges the oppression of women - and so easily fall in line with the artistic practice of much Western feminism. Other pieces are less overtly "political" and the show isn't without flashes of irony and humor.

In this vein, the first piece that captures your attention is "Arabic Nestling Dolls." The only "sculpture" in the show, this smartly designed set of wooden dolls is modeled on the Russian prototype - ovoid, hollow, with each doll containing a smaller doll.

The outermost layer of this Arabic variation is a female figure in full burqa. Arrayed beside her are four others, each progressively smaller and less encumbered by clothing. A blond woman in a backless gown awaits anyone unpacking the dolls to the end. This doubly reinforced play on the hijab is as witty an invocation of "the dance of the seven veils" as it is detente-era kitsch.

"Arabic Nestling Dolls" is the work of 27-year-old Iraqi-born, Sweden-based artist and designer Hayv Kahraman. The dolls are a sort of signature piece for her, being integral to the graphics of her Web site (hayfdesign.com). The balance of her work is drawings in sumi ink (preferred in Asian, and particularly Japanese, pen-and-ink drawing, made from soot, water and glue) on brown paper, though some of the pieces use acrylics and watercolors as well. All range from 25 centimeters by 18 centimeters to 58.5 centimeters by 108.5 centimeters.

The clean, sure lines of the drawings and striking design of the images make Kahraman's work the most eye-catching in the show. She evokes several different styles from around the globe. Most obviously, not least because of the woodblock stamp she uses to sign each piece, it is reminiscent of some historic Japanese and Chinese art.

Her figures are also redolent of Persian miniatures, and occasionally betray a taste for the surreal, or (as Egyptian critic and curator Bassam al-Baroni points out in the

essay he wrote for "Life Drawing") the work of Aubrey Beardsley, 19th-century Britain's illustrator of the aesthetes.

Most of Kahraman's images feature women rendered in various poses of oppression. "Chained Women," from 2006, finds a line of five women, arms raised, as if in a dance. Their huge eyes are downcast, though, and their arms chained at the wrist. This motif of bound women recurs in "Kurdish Women Dancing" and "In Line." The central image of "Honor Killings," also from 2006, is a Japanese-looking, wintertime tree (another repeated motif), the branches weighed down by a dozen veiled women, each hanged by the neck like strange fruit (to borrow an image from a song about lynching in the American South performed most memorably by Billie Holiday).

The weighty programmatic side of Kahraman's work threatens to overwhelm the aesthetic but she isn't humorless. One of her quieter but most effective pieces - and the only one in Life Drawing that's not centered on women - is titled "Man on Computer." The interplay classical-oriental and contemporary-technological is superb.

The other three-quarters of "Life Drawing" is devoted to the work of Emirati filmmaker and video artist Lamya Gargash, 25; Iranian painter Neda Hadizadeh, 28; and the drawings and painting of Kuwaiti artist Ghadah al-Kandari, 38.

Gargash's contribution is a triptych of video portraits from 2007: "Lee," "Neda" and "Izdihar." Each piece features a woman, fully covered in hijab, captured in a simple movement. Gargash has edited the tape, separating the women's face and hands from the clothing that confines them, and run the bifurcated images together on a split screen.

Ghadah al-Kandari's work tends to focus on dark-haired, female models in identical pudding-bowl haircuts but she works in two media that make for quite different flavors. More prominent by virtue of their size are her acrylic-on-canvas works. Dense, colorful and vaguely cubist, the paintings are relatively stolid works, whose energy derives from the artist's asymmetrical use of color to render the play of light and shadow. Kandari's pen-and-ink line drawings are of a different species - so whimsical and witty that the paintings seem labored and overwrought by comparison.

Though wearing the same haircut and world-weary expressionlessness as those in the paintings, these women - often accompanied by comic-style narration - are rapid-fire depictions of womanhood's mundane absurdities. "The Window Shoppers," from 2007, finds a daughter escorting her wheelchair-bound (but otherwise identical) mother through a shopping district, where the object of desire - a purse - is suspended in the air without window glass or display. "A Mother's Contraption," also from 2007, is a wry diagram for a self-pleasuring yet also torturing device that echoes women's biological utility.

More challenging are the untitled acrylic-on-canvas works of Neda Hadizadeh. Though these nine paintings aren't all equally accomplished, there is something intriguing about the style that defies description.

Eschewing overt political referents, Hadizadeh depicts the discomfort and pain of her subjects through equal parts rendering and erasure. Among those who convey emotion through the contortions of hands and eyes, she evokes her subjects' strained psyche via layers of color and shading before turn-ing to the task

of representation, sometimes sketched lightly in a single line.

Works like "Untitled 10" and "Untitled 11" take this principle to extremes, radically removing both eyes and hands from their anatomic context. "Untitled 18" and "Untitled 13" use swaths of color and shadow to channel the eye to the emotional heart of the piece - like shards of a broken vessel, or body.

"Life Drawing" is on view at the Third Line in Dubai through January 13. For more information call, please call +971 4 341 1367

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.