INTEREST: Visitors look at a piece from the collection. Right: THE CURATOR: Mayssa Fattouh, the curator of the exhibition, at the opening day in KAC.
By Umer Nangiana
Even randomly collected art pieces, when put together, tell a coherent story panning across the vicissitudes of an entire region. Mayssa Fattouh, an independent Doha-based curator, recently abstracted one such story out of many pieces that a prominent Arab collector has been collecting over the past two decades.
Out of a huge collection of over 500 objects of art, Fattouh selected just 17 to tell a complete story of the Arab region from varying socio-political angles that form the collector, Tariq al-Jaidah’s interpretation of a lived collective memory. They were displayed at the two-day exhibition called “Postscript from a Collector of the Arab Region-Selections from the TAJ Art Collection” at Katara Art Centre (KAC) this week.
The show brought together a selection of artworks in various mediums from the Tarkiq Al Jaidah Collection of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art.
“The idea behind the selection of these objects is to interconnect them to tell a story that the collector perceives as a sort of a collective memory of the region; the collective memory that is not the written one, not the historically proven one but tells stories that have determined the changes and the current status of the Arab region,” Fattouh, the curator, told Community.
“You have pieces such as those from Ziad Abillama here that points at the perception of the others towards the Arabs and then the Arabs [themselves] towards each other. They are scattered. It is sort of a larger critique,” added the curator.
She said the collection for the exhibition also includes art pieces related to the Palestinian issue, displacement issues and then, “you have got pieces that tell about religion in terms of the layers that go on in Arab region when it comes to the question of religion.”
“And then you have got, of course, the modernists facing the contemporary [artists]. It was a big challenge to select these pieces and present them in such a spontaneous way, especially how they can be understood and interpreted in this space,” said Fattouh.
She said in a situation such as this when the curator has to select from such large a collection to form a singular story, she tried to stick as much as possible to the original idea. Here, she added, it was not so much the text or the curatorial framework rather the story that builds or informs this collection.
“So I tried to stick to that. And there is a small interview of the collector on the TV screen to sort of also explain and give a bit of background to the collection itself,” said the curator, referring to a small TV screening her interview with the collector, placed in the exhibition space for visitors to see.
Fattouh said Jaidah’s collection has a unique openness to medium, the subject and the time frame that she liked the most. He labels himself as an Arab collector and that is why the exhibition taps into the subjects that are at the heart of the transformation, changes and issues, Fattouh told Community.
Talking about the Arab art scene, she said, it is different in itself and follows its own aesthetics. “You can also see from some of the work here, the aesthetical language that each artist wanted to create beyond the Euro-centric aesthetic that they studied there,” said Fattouh. “Most of them (the artists), particularly the modern artists, studied in Europe but when they came back to their countries, they were really concerned about the aesthetics that they would be building for the generations to come and how the work is perceived in the local context,” she added.
She said the Middle Eastern art scene is booming. Though she does not believe in measuring the boom through auction houses and numbers, the figures do reflect it. Nonetheless, Fattouh said, there is a bigger production that is happening in the Arab region ad there is a large demand.
She has been in Doha for five years. She was directing the art centre for two and a half years before she left a few months ago due to financial issues faced by the KAC, she said.
Currently, she is working as an independent curator based in Doha. Fattouh said she is researching on independent spaces in GCC as well as co-founding a platform in Beirut, Lebanon, working on ephemeral projects in the city of Doha outside the institutional space, but probably in collaboration with an institution.
The artists displayed in the exhibition include Abdul Kader El Rassam, Abdulnasser Gharem, Emily Jacir, Farid Belkahia, Faik Hassan, Fateh Moudarres, Gazbia Sirry, Hassan Sharif, Jeffar Khaldi, Lorna Salim, Manal al-Dowayan, Mona Hatoum, Mahmoud Obaidi, Sophia al-Maria, Shakir Hassan, Walid Raad, Yto Barrada and Ziad Abillama.