OVAL, LINGOTTO FIERE, TURIN
BOOTH: BLACK 12
As a continuation of Involved in Nonsense - a solo presentation dedicated to Hassan Sharif's early practice in Back to the Future at Artissima in 2015 - this year we are pleased to present the artist's recent Objects, which he started creating in the 1980s.
Always questioning the functional and the useless, the found and the created, Sharif transformed consumer products and waste into complex assemblages and weavings. In his Objects, he raised concerns about consumerism and social order, the human body and the physical evidence of our times. According to the artist, his Objects are the vernacular aesthetics of everything that is 'useless, meaningless and artificial' and illustrate an important truth about the world we live in. Weaving them together with rope, coil and twine, the heaps and bundles that he created became a visualisation of the surplus of mass-production - the commonly unseen by product of the UAE's globalised, consumerist society that developed since the country's formation.
Hassan Sharif (1951-2016) made a vital contribution to conceptual art and experimental practice in the Middle East through 40 years of performance, installation, drawing, painting, and assemblage. Prior to leaving the UAE to study in London in 1979, Sharif gained attention for his cartoons published in the UAE press - ironic, outspoken critiques of the rapid industrialisation of the Emirates and political deadlock of 1970s Arab Nationalism. As an artist, he rejected calligraphic abstraction, which was becoming the dominant discourse in the Middle East at that time, and pursued instead a pointedly contemporary vocabulary, drawing on the non-elitism and intermedia of Fluxus and the potential in British Constructionism's systemic processes of making. Sharif graduated from The Byam Shaw School of Art (now part of the Central Saint Martins) in 1984 and returned to the UAE shortly after. He set about staging interventions and the first exhibitions of contemporary art in Sharjah, as well as translating art historical texts and manifestos into Arabic so as to provoke a local audience to engage with - or at least reject - contemporary art discourse. Sharif's Objects, which handed cheap, mass-produced or discarded materials back to society as artworks, were a vital instrument in provoking and engaging UAE audiences with contemporary art.
