Welcome

UAE art archive is the virtual home of the United Arab Emirates art community. A platform setup up to continuously document the evolution of the art panorama in the UAE.

Artists create a profile and share your work, art protagonists explore and contribute to the timeline and share your events on the community calender.

The Feature

About the UAE Pavilion

The United Arab Emirates steps onto this stage, presenting its pavilion for all the following reasons: to establish its presence among other nations, to build capacity for the future, to inspire Emiratis and expatriates to see art as essential to the robust society they’re building. The UAE Pavilion is meant to be a source of pride, an encouragement to invest in the arts and education, a showcase for a young but fast-developing artistic community.

The title for the UAE Pavilion: “It’s Not You, It’s Me”, is a clichéd expression, uttered in daily life with guilt and embarrassment, might be interpreted as an awkward apology, as if acknowledge that any dissatisfaction felt by the visitor must be due to the inadequacies of the Pavilion itself. But then, more to the point, the phrase can be taken literally, in a spirit of shameless self-assurance: “Look – what you’re seeing in Venice is no longer about you. It’s the UAE’s turn now.” It is pavilion about pavilion, an exhibition about exhibition-making, a national representation that reflects on the very act of national showcasing at the Venice Biennale.

The featured artist is Lamya Gargash, a UAE-born artist who has produced a new series of photographs for the Pavilion. This body of work addresses the concept of our Pavilion by playing on representation of national infrastructure – not only by asking what representation can mean in such a context, but what national infrastructure really is to begin with.

The Pavilion features traditional “national expo” elements such as architectural models of UAE museum infrastructure – neither glamorizing nor critiquing the UAE, but drawing attention to the World’s Fair tradition at the Venice Biennale. Elements of this part of the Pavilion include a video installation by the artist Hannah Hurtzig, who has been working with new ways to engage the public with experts and their specialized knowledge. Another element will be a showroom of work by UAE artists, Hassan Sharif*, Tarek Al Ghoussein, Huda Saeed Saif, and Ebtisam Abdul Aziz, as well as a documentation of a performance by the Jackson Pollock Bar.

The UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is initiated by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Community Development, under His Excellency Abdul Rahman Mohammed Al Owais, and is sponsored by the Emirates Foundation and the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (DCAA)

*The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Foundation & Qatar Museums Authority