April 15th is known as World Art Day, a day dedicated to the international celebration of fine arts and imaginative works. Art as we know it is not just about paintings and sculptures, in fact, art covers a broad spectrum of media, theatre, music, film and literature. This year’s theme of World Art Day is ‘love and peace,’ which seems fitting considering how badly our chaotic world needs it.
In honour of celebrating art in the Middle East, we caught up with Gaith Abdulla, who is the founder of Engage101 a platform used to speak about art in the UAE, and the owner of Bayt AlMamzar, an art space in Dubai. He gave us an insight into what art means to him and his stance on art in the Middle East.
Gaith Abdulla explains that art to him is “a way to document and connect with my contemporary reality and deconstructing and raising important questions about current day society, culture and politics among other things.” A powerful moment in the art world for Gaith was “witnessing the sudden ‘let there be art’ moment that happened around 2007-08 when there was a massive top-down movement towards beefing up the art ecosystem in the UAE.”
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In terms of the Middle Eastern art scene, Gaith believes that we’re still in the early stages. “The art ecosystem is in the early days of growth in the region, there is much more to come. The past decade has been characterised by the investment by governments and large institutional actors, the coming decade will be led by the grassroots efforts and the communities that the previous decade’s investments have produced,” he expresses.
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In recent years the number of art collectors in the region has been growing rapidly, he believes “the reason behind the growth of the art ecosystem is no secret, it was massive government-led investments, but that can only create an umbrella, there are many gaps that need to be filled within this that cannot be produced by top-down decisions, investment or otherwise. Art collecting is one of them, it is a deeply social activity and can only emerge from within societies appreciative of the value of collecting art for its social, political and historical value. If art collecting is gaining momentum in the UAE and wider region, it is a sign of maturing knowledge-based economies that are coming into their own.”
