Booth S21
Aisha Alabbar Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in Abu Dhabi Art 2023 for the third consecutive year. This year, Aisha Alabbar Gallery will be showcasing Emirati artist, poet, and multi-award-winning film director, Nujoom Alghanem (b. Dubai, 1962).
One of the show’s crown jewels is the collection of paintings from the mid 1990s. Distinct in their small size, earthy colour scheme and compositional intrigue – abstract and figurative all at once – many of these oil paintings were made during Alghanem’s time in the USA, from where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Video Production from Ohio University in 1996. During her undergraduate years, Nujoom Alghanem took a variety of electives and developed deep fascinations with history, African masks, mysticism, mythology and “the anthropological aspect of things”. It reflected in her work. She experimented with materials, such as burlap, to give her paintings texture and in her oil paintings, the “undefined creatures, both human and non-human but not animals” told of other worlds. “These kinds of obsessions don’t go,” says Alghanem. “They come back.” They did, in paintings from the early 2000s.
The showcased ’colour cousins’ of this set of mythological paintings is an assortment of abstract works wholly inspired by Alghanem’s love for the fall that began in Ohio, where she saw all seasons. The fall filled her poetry, an art form that she has been practicing for over two decades, consistently pushing the boundaries of what contemporary Arabic poetry is. In the written word – both that which she reads and writes – Alghanem finds solace as well as the source from which she creates art. In using the word as a point of departure for her artistic creations (film or painting), she releases, or at least attempts to.
These selection of works present key foundational pillars of Alghanem’s two-decade-plus career, it most certainly reveals characteristics of the artist herself: an incredible sense of resilience, a profound desire to know more and do more, an acute curiosity, and an openness to exploration. For the first time, Alghanem presents photographs – stills from her films – with select handwritten verses of her own poetry.
In marrying the written word with a still from the moving image, Alghanem posits: do we read the text and understand the image, or do we see the image and understand the text? Does it even matter? Isn’t film poetry? Isn’t poetry words? And don’t words ultimately make a visual essay? The answers are in one’s secrets.
The showcased ’colour cousins’ of this set of mythological paintings is an assortment of abstract works wholly inspired by Alghanem’s love for the fall that began in Ohio, where she saw all seasons. The fall filled her poetry, an art form that she has been practicing for over two decades, consistently pushing the boundaries of what contemporary Arabic poetry is. In the written word – both that which she reads and writes – Alghanem finds solace as well as the source from which she creates art. In using the word as a point of departure for her artistic creations (film or painting), she releases, or at least attempts to.
These selection of works present key foundational pillars of Alghanem’s two-decade-plus career, it most certainly reveals characteristics of the artist herself: an incredible sense of resilience, a profound desire to know more and do more, an acute curiosity, and an openness to exploration. For the first time, Alghanem presents photographs – stills from her films – with select handwritten verses of her own poetry.
In marrying the written word with a still from the moving image, Alghanem posits: do we read the text and understand the image, or do we see the image and understand the text? Does it even matter? Isn’t film poetry? Isn’t poetry words? And don’t words ultimately make a visual essay? The answers are in one’s secrets.
Location:
Hours:
Monday, November 20th 4-7 pm (by invitation only)
Tuesday, November 21st 3-9 pm (by invitation only)
Wednesday, November 22nd 1-3 PM (by invitation only)
Wednesday, November 22nd 3-9 PM (Public) - Sunday, November 26th, 2-9 pm
Written by: Myrna Ayad