Join architect and writer Todd Reisz for the first Night School at Jameel Arts Centre. A small seminar of Dubai residents will meet to explore the ways Dubai has been shaped by design and by the people who transformed design into reality. With several guests joining us, we explore Dubai’s growth and ambitions in relation to other cities in the Gulf. The seminar will meet from January 9 until January 26, on Sunday and Wednesday evenings at 7:00 p.m. There are also some planned evening film screenings.

Professionals, students and everyone who is curious are welcome to register for the free course. No prior academic experience is necessary. The only requirements: a commitment to all 6 classes and proficiency in reading English texts. This public programme coincides with Off Centre / On Stage curated by Reisz – currently on display at the Centre.

Todd Reisz’s work examines the global practice of architecture, specifically how the architect circulates technologies and cultural narratives. His book Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2020) explores architecture’s packaging to sell Dubai on a global stage. He also co-edited with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi Building Sharjah (Birkhäuser, 2021), an archival investigation of that city’s vanishing 20th-century landscape.

Film Programme
Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) by Stephanie Comilang
10 January, 2022- 6 February, 2022
Location: Gallery 9
Continuous screening each day

Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) is a science fiction documentary set against the backdrop of Hong Kong, and in particular its Central district, one of the main areas where Filipina migrant workers gather on their day off on Sundays; transforming sites of finance and commerce into spaces of care-giving and support. The film is narrated from the perspective of Paraiso – a ghost played by a drone – who speaks of the isolation of uprootedness. Paraiso waits for Sundays, where she can meet with the women and transmit their vlogs, photos and messages back home. The rest of the week sees Paraiso in isolation, riddled with loneliness and longing.

Stephanie Comilang (b. 1980) lives and works between Toronto, Canada and Berlin, Germany. Her documentary-based works create narratives exploring how global understandings of mobility, capital and labour are determined through various cultural and social factors. In 2019 Comilang was awarded the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious prize for artists under 40 years of age.

Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, Ghost : 2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Asia Art Archive in America, New York.

Last chance to view

Film Programme
Glimpses of Now
Date: 26 December, 2021 - 9 January, 2022
Location: Gallery 9
Continuous screening each day

Glimpses of Now is a visual and auditory exploration of the cities and people of Saudi Arabia. Mohammad Alfaraj shot the video in a documentary format using a video camera and mobile phone. This is an ongoing project, and the artist has been gathering footage for the film since 2015.

Currently on view

Exhibitions: 
The Distance From Here
Date: 8 September, 2021 - 22 January, 2022
Location: Level 1

Drawn from the Art Jameel Collection, plus loans and new commissions, The Distance from Here is a major, timely group exhibition highlighting 11 artists’ personal responses to, and interactions with space and time. The show includes works by Mona Ayyash, Yto Berrada, Hicham Benohoud, Jason Dodge, Shilpa Gupta, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Hrair Sarkissian, Do Ho Suh, and Anup Mathew Thomas. 

This group exhibition explores how our bodies become essential materials to navigating the day-to-day spaces in which we exist: through touch, language, movement and memory, exploring our lived experiences and connections to the individual and collective. Focusing on spaces of transition, both physical and non-physical, the exhibited works explore the 'in-between' spaces and exchanges that are often forgotten, overlooked or come to our attention during periods of prolonged reflection.      

The Distance from Here is accompanied by a public programme of talks, workshops and tours; a film programme, screening in Gallery 9 from November 30, 2021, to January 2, 2022; and an exhibition catalogue published by Art Jameel and produced in collaboration with the Art Jameel Library, including essays by Dawn Ross, Nadine Ghandour and Mihir Wairkar. 

Exhibitions: 
Off-Centre / On-Stage, curated by Todd Reisz
Date: 29 September, 2021 - 21 March, 2022
Location: Lobby

Off Centre / On Stage presents around 60 photographs with documentation drawn from archives and newspapers in the ‘70s, collected by architect and writer Todd Reisz for more than a decade in the UAE and around the world. Supported by Barjeel Art Foundation, Off Centre / On Stage captures a moment of early ambition for Dubai as the city started to strive for global stature –perhaps the origins of its role in hosting Expo 2020. The collection of photos, mainly taken by architects Stephen Finch and Mark Harris between 1976 and 1979, capture a city of people from many walks of life, living in the present but employed to create the future. Images, newspaper clippings and archival material trace the making of Dubai—all stacked, lit and displayed—rendering a showroom floor of a city that has been deliberately on display for 70 years. 

Accompanying the exhibition is a new publication with an original essay by Reisz and never-before-published photographs beyond those featured in the show. The book, designed by Huda AbiFares, is a collaboration between Art Jameel and Khatt Books.

Exhibitions: 
Pacita Abad: I Thought the Streets Were Paved with Gold
Date: 8 September, 2021 - 13 February, 2022
Location: Ground floor

I Thought the Streets Were Paved with Gold is the first solo exhibition in the Middle East of works by the revered, late Filipina artist Pacita Abad. The show brings together exuberant signature works – from her colourful trapunto embroideries to major paintings, with a focus on four main bodies of work including Masks and Spirits series (1979 - 1991), the Immigrant Experience (1983-1995), the Door to life series (1998-2003) and abstract works (1985-2002) – that together span abstraction to social realism, taking the exhibition visitor on a compelling journey from Manila to Hong Kong, via New York, Sanaa and beyond. The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme, publication and a free Tagalog resources available online.

Exhibitions: 
Artist’s Rooms: Samson Young
Date: 30 October, 2021 - 7 May, 2022
Location: Galleries

Samson Young’s Artist’s Room features a new, site-specific installation, Reasonable Music – an interactive environment consisting of (text as) sound and (text as) image. The components within this environment are derived from the processing of translating the Daoist text Daodejing. Insights from computational analysis on the text’s formal features are filtered through human intuition to generate a network of sonic and visual objects. As formal features progress along a chain of events, they are transformed, distorted, and take on new features.

Drawn largely from the Art Jameel Collection, Artist’s Rooms is a series of solo exhibitions by influential, innovative artists, with a particular focus on practitioners from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. These capsule shows are collaborative and curated in dialogue with the artist. 

Artist’s Rooms: Samson Young is accompanied by a monograph with an essay by Orianna Cacchione, Curator of Global Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, at the University of Chicago. The monograph is published by Art Jameel and is available from the Art Jameel Shop. 

Reasonable Music is commissioned by Art Jameel in collaboration with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Burger Collection. Each venue will show an iteration of the work, one on display at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the other on display at Jameel Arts Centre from Saturday, October 30, 2021.

Installation:
Composition for a Public Park by Hassan Khan
Date: 7 September, 2021 onwards
Location: Jaddaf Waterfront Sculpture Park

This autumn, artist Hassan Khan’s large-scale, multi-lingual musical artwork returns by popular demand to the Jaddaf Waterfront Sculpture Park for the third year. Designed to be experienced by moving through space, it features musical scores and spoken narrative, written in three movements and composed especially for a public park. At the heart of each movement is a narration of a text written by the artist and presented here in three languages; Arabic, Urdu and English. 

Site-Specific Installation: 
Artist’s Garden: “Desert is a Forest” by Namrata Neog and Sunoj D
Date: 17 October, 2020 - 4 September, 2022
Location: Creekside, between galleries 2 and 3
Jameel Arts Centre's latest Artist's Garden commission awarded to Namrata Neog and Sunoj D's 'Desert is a Forest' explores the entangled relationship between humans, animals and the flora and fauna within the UAE landscape. The plant species grown in the Artist's Garden are indigenous to the UAE and tell the story of their traditional uses as food and medicine, offering a means to explore local plant ecology and nutritional habits. 

Publication: 
Jameel Library Commissions: Sarnath Banerjee
Date: 18 January, 2021 - Ongoing
Location: Online - Jameel Arts Centre 
The Jameel Library, an integral part of Jameel Arts Centre - Dubai's contemporary art institution - published its first illustrated novel by Sarnath Banerjee titled 17-Year Cicada, an episodic account of a young woman trapped in a vast library. She goes through the stages of denial, anger and acceptance. Surrendering to her fate, she roams around desolate reading rooms, walking between the shelves, taking selfies and eating from the well-stocked refrigerator. Sometimes, she has imaginary conversations. The place feels like the furthest outpost of the Gobi desert. The full novel can be read through the link here.
Sarnath Banerjee is a graphic novelist, artist and cofounder of Phantomville, the comics publishing house. Through his books, Banerjee explores the South Asian middle-class nature, delving into themes such as power, masculinity, bureaucracy, rumour, class-system, meritocracy, religion and the uncanny.