News

Art Basel: Online Viewing Rooms

VIP Viewing Access: 23-24 September
Public Access: 25-26 September

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Dubai-based collective Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian featuring an on-going series of works on paper entitled Where To? Wherever it Chances. Probing a world rocked by upheaval and instability, the artists appropriate images from current media streams, destabilising them to uncanny ends. 

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Malmö Konsthall, Sweden

Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi and Mats Stjernstedt
Until 10 January, 2021

The second European iteration of Hassan Sharif: I Am The Single Work Artist at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, travels from Sharjah Art Foundation (2018) and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2020). The exhibition includes just over 150 pieces, which range from early satirical cartoons and documentation of the performances in the Hatta desert to sculptural works that were produced in the last year of his life. The emphasis in the exhibition is on sculptures and objects. The exhibition will be on view at the musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMC), Saint-Étienne, in spring 2021.

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3 September - 13 December

Online opening: 2 September, 7PM CEST

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is thrilled to announce the first solo exhibition in Germany by the Dubai-based collective of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt entitled Either he's dead or my watch has stopped. Groucho Marx (while getting the patient's pulse), borrowing from the film classic A Day at the Races (1937) by the Marx Brothers.

Curated by Dr. Martina Weinhart, the expansive installation debuts a monumental floor painting created especially for the SCHIRN – a dense web of detailed narratives and references supplemented by sculptures and video works, such as We Are the Eighth of a Kind (2014), in collab­o­ra­tion with the artist and musi­cian Lonnie Holley, From Sea to Dawn (2016), and the new produc­tion If I Had Two Paths I Would Choose the Third(2020). The base and center of the trio’s artistic work is their house in Dubai. In the process of living and working together, they create artworks and exhibitions frequently in an exchange with friends and other artists. In line with this principle, the exhibition also includes two textile sculptures by Franco-Egyptian artist Hoda Tawakol.

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Curated by Carl De Smet

Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (MoCAB) 

Until the reopening of the museum

PUFF OUT is a Bitter Medicine to museums under lockdown, initiated by the artist duo :mentalKLINIK and curated by Carl De Smet for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade as the first host. :mentalKLINIK’s PUFF OUT installation is physically set in the premises of the museum, but extended onto digital platforms.
It consists of six robot hoovers, programmed to detect dust in a room covered with heaps of glitter particles. The hoovers make their own drawings in a room devoid of humans and filled with glitter, illuminating the museum spaces that are no longer fit for their initial purpose. The scene is filmed and broadcasted live at all times on the museum’s website.
BLACK SWAN IS FLOATING IN THE ART WORLD.
ARE YOU READY TO TAKE THE BITTER MEDICINE BY :MENTALKLINIK?

For the live 24/7 stream, click here

We're happy to share Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian’s new video From March to April... 2020 (available on Youtube) along with some of artists' notes below: 

"The video is a record of a period of time, working and living in quarantine (which we have always been privileged to do) that is made casually with our phones on our daily activities/routines. It borrows verses from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and references Iranian poet and film director Forough Farrokhzad’s documentary entitled The House Is Black. 
The video is trying to show the transient moments of life while the world is on pause and in solidarity over covid-19. 
The video is an invitation to be vigilant. Our aim is to show time different from duration - duration is finite but time is like a third path, a product of the imagination.”

For the full video, click here

Antananarivo, Madagascar
8 February - 26 April 2020

:mentalKLINIK participate in the first multi-disciplinary exhibition organized by The Art and Culture Endowment Fund HY entitled Here We Reach all the Dreams of the World. The exhibition inauguratesthe fund’s new Art Platform HY which will be dedicated to enhance the value of art and culture in Madagascar through artistic residencies and cultural exchanges.

Musée Régional d'Art Contemporain (MRAC) Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée, France
Until 19 April 2020

For his first personal exhibition in a French museum, Abdelkader Benchamma invests three rooms of the MRACin an immersive installation which operates a network of echoes and resonances, playing with the codes of figuration and abstraction. These organic flows bring to mind the movement of natural elements, like air, clouds, earth, space. 
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Grey Art Gallery, New York
Curated and organized by Suheyla Takesh, Barjeel Art Foundation, and Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery at NYU
Until 4 April

Hassan Sharif is included in Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s which explores mid-20th-century abstract art from North Africa, West Asia, and the Arab diaspora. Comprising nearly 90 works by artists from across the region. The selection of works reflect the wide range of nonfigurative art practices that flourished in the Arab world over the course of four decades.

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Witte De With, Rotterdam
Until 19 July 2020

This exhibition explores the immigration of form. It regards a cultural product that is as much the result of local traditions as it is a cosmopolitan artifact. The show invites you to consider a blue-and-white ceramic piece as both a vessel and a port. It gathers artworks in different media made by contemporary artists from the Americas, Asia, and Europe. 
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Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manilla 
6 February – 12 April 2020

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian participate inConstructions of Truths. The exhibition asks us to reflect on the truths of images that populate our everyday lives and how these affect how we view the world. Artists included in the show present work using the projected image as a metaphor for how images are projected on us as viewers and how artists, through formal, aesthetic and narrative spaces, question these constructions.

Constructions of Truths is presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila in partnership with the Han Nefkens Foundation and in collaboration with Edouard Malingue Gallery, Kurimanzutto, The Ruya Foundation and Silverlens.
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AlUla, Saudi Arabia

Co-curated by Saudi curators Raneem Farsi and Aya Alireza with Desert X Artistic Director Neville Wakefield

31 January - 7 March 2020

Manal AlDowayan presents an installation of 12 trampolines at Desert X AlUla. Entitled Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (2020), AlDowayan’s work riffs off the humble puddle—an ephemeral concentration of water stopped in its path as it flows to the lowest point of gravity—yet highlights burning issues of irresponsible irrigation practices that have spiked water scarcity in Saudi Arabia today.

Like alien puddles dotting the craggy AlUla valley, twelve trampolines invite viewers to bounce, touch, lounge or simply reflect. At sunset, the structures become Moon Circles, lit by a series of special lighting techniques. 

Organised collaboratively by Desert X and the Royal Commission of AlUla (RCU), Desert X AlUla is the first site-responsive exhibition of its kind in Saudi Arabia.

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21,39 Jeddah Arts
Organized by the Saudi Art Council, Curated by Maya El Khalil
Until 28 April 2020

Manal AlDowayan and Mohammed Kazem participate in the seventh edition of 21,39 Jeddah Arts titled I Love You Urgently.
The art initiative is a call to action in response to the environmental emergency from the specificity of a local context. At a time when Saudi Arabia is undergoing a rapid transformation, the council called on local and international artists, architects, designers and thinkers to seek tangible solutions and to formulate alternative and symbiotic ways to inhabit our planet.
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Booth C44
Palexpo, Geneva

Preview: Wednesday, 29 January
30 January - 2 February 

We are pleased to announce our participation in the upcoming edition of Art Genéve, with works by HASSAN SHARIF, ROKNI HAERIZADEH, :mentalKLINIK and MOHAMMED KAZEM.

Artworks preview
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Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi 

10 December - 16 February

Publishing is the act of making public. It is not restricted to specific producers, languages of production, sanctified routes of distribution, and privileged readers. This is not publishing as we have come to know it. The Arab World is home to a growing number of book fairs and art book fairs. These two types of public platforms run parallel to each other, representing different, if not opposing, economies of cultural capital, systems of representation of subjects and subjectivities, as well as strategies for encountering and conversing with an audience

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Manchester Art Gallery

Curated by Clare Gannaway

Until 19 September 2019 

Rokni Haerizadeh is currently participating in Get Together and Get Things Done which investigates what brings and binds people together from protest to partying, how power and control operate globally and historically, and how history, media and art shape collective action. This exhibition features works from the gallery’s collection as well as national and international loans from the 18th to the 21st century. Together, they examine the importance of the communal action over the past two centuries in relationship to topics such as empire, trade, and economics, as well as the role of public protest.

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Collège des Bernardins, Paris

4 October - 10 November

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the reopening of the Collège des Bernardins, Paris, Abdelkader Benchamma will transform the entire nave of the building into an immersive wall drawing installation. Both powerful and poetic in its formal execution, the artist's attempts to disrupt visceral perception of space and time. Co-aligned with his exhibition, Benchamma will participate in Nuit Blanche 2018 in Paris, an annual all-night arts festival taking place on 6th October. This year's edition thematically inspired by the research of George Lemaître, a priest astronomer and physicist who was one of the first men to have thought of the expansion of the universe. Benchamma's contribution, alongside Melik Ohanian, have been invited to realise a vast installation specifically for the floor of the nave of the Collège des Bernardins.

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Booth: Focus, A24

Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

14 - 17 November

Preview: 13 November

We are pleased to participate at this year’s 10th-anniversary edition of Abu Dhabi Art, with a presentation surrounding the conceptual practice of Mohammed Kazem, highlighting recent works in tandem with key photo documentation of his performances since the 1990s. 

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Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai

Curated by Murtaza Vali

11 November 2018 - 23 March 2019

We are very pleased to share Hassan Sharif's inclusion in Crude, curated by Murtaza Vali, in the inaugural series of exhibitions at the new venue of Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai. Bringing together 17 artists and collectives from the region and beyond, Crude explores oil as an agent of social, cultural and economic transformation across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a driver of geo-political upheaval. 

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Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah

29 September - 10 November

Celebrating ten years of Production Programme grants, Sharjah Art Foundation will present a selection of works from previous editions of the Production Programme this autumn, of which Raed Yassin is included. Yassin, the 2014 awardee, participates with his work entitled Exhibition No. 8 (2016) from his Warhol of Arabia series. One of Sharjah Art Foundation’s core initiatives, the Production Programme challenges artists, mostly from the region, to conceive and realise innovative work that transforms the way art is understood and experienced.

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Collège des Bernardins, Paris

4 October - 10 November

Collège des Bernardins, Paris

6 October 

We are pleased to share details of a new monograph for Haleh Redjaian entitled in sequence (2018), edited by Wolfgang Fetz and Jörg van den Berg. Published by Verlag für Moderne Kunst, the book provides a backbone overview of Redjaian’s practice in tandem with acute insight into her formal ideologies of art making. The author pointedly remarks, “One sees geometric forms | strict order | grids | patterns | but primarily one sees Redjaian’s base material: the line | rather many lines| in many instances in the mode of serial repetition." 

in sequence will also be available at Gallery IVDE in October.

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Various locations in New York

5 September - 2 November

Studio visit: Monday, October 29, 6:30 - 8:30pm

La Patinoire Royale, Brussels

Curator: Jérôme Sans 

7 September - 8 December

La Patinoire Royale / Galerie Valérie Bach is happy to present OBNOXIOUSLY HAPPY, :mentalKLINIK’s first solo exhibition in Belgium, curated by Jérôme Sans. "The exhibition, which brings together a whole fifteen years of their activity - such an introspective rather retrospective - presents a symptomatic set of the multifaceted approach of their universe that constantly blurs borders. :mentalKLINIK is an allusion to the laboratory where coexist practice and theory, as the :mental refers to the spirit and the KLINIK to practice " (Jérôme Sans).

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Eugster || Belgrade

Curator: Yasmina Reggad.

12 September - 1 December

Zaouia of Sidi Boukhrissane, Tunis

Curated by Khadija Hamdi Soussi

27 June - 1 July

Organised by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, JAOU Tunis returns for its 5th edition to explore the cultural heritage in post-revolution Tunisia. The exhibition surveys the idea of 'approved heritage' through four elements: fire, air, water and earth. German-Iranian artist Haleh Redjaian creates spatial thread installations and murals for the exhibition Imaginary Museum, which takes French novelist André Malraux's writings as a starting point to question the notion of contemporary art in the Arab world.

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Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR), Turin

Curated by Abaseh Mirvali

12 July - 30 September

First Art Museum, Nashville

Curated by Mark W. Scala

22 June - 16 September

Borrowed from the collection of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a selection of works from Rokni Haerizadeh's on-going Fictionville series is presented in Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century. The exhibition features paintings by an international array of artists that induce feelings of disturbance, curiosity, and expansiveness through the portrayal of forces shaping and disrupting society, such as economics, ideological conflict, language, technology, science, and philosophy. "Haerizadeh's exaggerations bring out the savagery of the actions they depict, highlighting the bestial undertones of political rituals. Victim and aggressor are equally grotesque, as are landscape and architecture," notes writer Media Farzin in her essay Unpeopled: Cosmopolitan Figurations in Recent Paintings, published in the catalogue. Chaos and Awe will tour the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia in November 2018.

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Edited by Sharmeen Inayat

Published in April 2018 

Vikram Divecha and Mohammed Kazem contribute to Uncommon Dubai +, a publication that offers a sliver of quotidian and artistic reflections on spaces of change and exchange, imbued with meaning and memory for individuals, communities and diasporas that enrich the city and its neighbouring emirates. Against the backdrop of the morphing coastline and the alluring locus of the creek, explore memoirs, investigations and poetic landscapes of the mind that are meant to engage with the contrasts of the city and offer collective aspirations for its past, present and possible futures.

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LACMA, Los Angeles

Curated by Linda Komaroff

6 May - 9 September

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art, a groundbreaking exhibition of both historical and contemporary Iranian works that highlight ways in which artists have used and continue to use the past as a metaphor for the present day. This notion is revealed in art and literature in which ancient kings and heroes are used in later contexts as examples of virtue or as objects of derision, while long-gone Shi'ite saints are evoked as champions of the poor and the oppressed. The exhibition examines this appropriation of the past, largely in the context of the present including a large scale concrete poetry by Ramin Haerizadeh based on two significant newspaper headline during the Iranian Revolution.

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Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva

Curated by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi

30 May - 9 September

Musée d'art moderne et contemporain (mamco) is inaugurating the first phase of its reflections concerning the internationalisation of its exhibition corpus and the emergence of a world art history with four summer exhibitions. We Began By Measuring Distance features works by Hassan Sharif, Marwan Rechmaoui and Basma Al Sharif from the collection of the Sharjah Art Foundation, and responds to the invitation to broaden the frame of reference of practices under review at mamco.

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BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham

26 May - 17 July

Featuring Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian's video animation Big Rock Candy Mountain, alongside works by Slavs and Tatars, Samson Young, Taus Makhacheva, Leila Al-Yousuf and Ryan Heath, the exhibition refers to the Caucasus region between Europe and Asia, known for its large number of distinct languages and cultures.

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Galerie A, Izmir

Curated by Dr Necmi Sönmez

Organised by K2 Contemporary Art Centre

Until 8 April

The 4th edition of PortIzmir - Izmir International Contemporary Art Triennial looks into the future that appears pressured by the ever-present avant-garde archive, backward glances and repeated modernist discourses. Featuring works by :mentalKLINIK, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Claus Föttinger and Füsun Onur, among others, the exhibition seeks to examine the current state of contemporary image-making and highlights ways of political and poetical reflections.

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Booth C35

Tour & Taxis, Brussels

19 - 22 April

We are pleased to participate in the 50th edition of Art Brussels with works by Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem as well as collaborative and individual works by Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian.

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Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

24 November 2018 - 28 April 2019

The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) announced the list of participating artists for its upcoming edition, including Hassan Sharif. The exhibition will feature a wide range of art forms and give particular focus to artists exploring the ongoing presence of spirituality in digital times, the multiple ways that wealth, value and labour operate, the agency of the body, and concerns for others as well as the vulnerability of the natural world.

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Galleria d'Arte Moderna (GAM), Milan

Curated by Sara Raza, Paola Zatti, Omar Cucciniello

11 April - 17 June

Borrowing its title from a series of drawings by Rokni Haerizadeh, But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise - Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africaat Galleria d'Arte Moderna (GAM) marks the final exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Featuring works by Lida Abdul, Abbas Akhavan, Kader Attia, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Ali Cherri, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Rokni Haerizadeh, Susan Hefuna, Iman Issa, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hassan Khan, and Ahmed Mater, this exhibition features a diverse range of artistic voices and critical concerns from a rapidly evolving region and its international diaspora. The exhibition offers a cross-circulation of ideas rooted in science, mathematics and philosophy and raises urgent issues of migration and displacement in areas around the world, including Italy.

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Wallach Art Gallery, New York

Curated by Natalie Bell

Until 8 April

As part of his first-year exhibition at Columbia University, Vikram Divecha presents a single partition panel that is acquired from the contractors of Frieze art fair. The panel will be returned to the contractor to be installed as a functional partition panel at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde's booth during Frieze New York in May. Panel (2018), is an ongoing project and examines how objects and practices accrue value, as they circulate via galleries, institutions, fairs and exhibitions. Divecha intends to keep fluctuating the role of the panel post the art fair.

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Villa Empain - Boghossian Foundation, Brussels

Curated by Louma Salamé

15 March - 19 August

Abdelkader Benchamma presents a new composition for the upcoming group exhibition at Villa Empain, which examines the origins of the feeling of melancholia - manifested in both the East and the West since ancient history - which unremittingly reminds us of a lost origin, and instills in us a sense of mourning for a past world. This feeling of melancholy remains at the heart of the problems we are confronted with today because the world we face is an inevitable cause for concern, especially given the irreversible climate change.

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Malmö Konsthall, Sweden

Curated by François Piron and Mats Stjernstedt

Until 6 May

Odradek invited eight artists including Hassan Sharif, Judith Scott, Laura Lamiel, Henri Jacob, Oscar Tuazon, Franz Erhard Walther, Katinka Bock and Nairy Baghramian whose works similarly transgress the fixed dualities between subject and object. The exhibition aims at making links and weaving affinities between the practices of these artists from various backgrounds and generations.

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Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Curated by Ferran Barenblit and Nasser Abdullah

Until 17 March

Mohammed Kazem and Hassan Sharif participate in From Barcelona to Abu Dhabi: Works from the MACBA Art Collection in dialogue with the Emirates. The exhibition, which is part of the Abu Dhabi Festival and held in partnership with Manarat Al Saadiyat, showcases highlights from the MACBA collection in dialogue with artworks by 20 Emirati artists from ADMAF's collection and borrowed from private collectors.

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Fort Island, Madinat Jumeirah

Commissioned by Shumon Basar

Wednesday 21 March, 5:30 - 6:30 pm

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, alongside Yuri Pattison, Ania Soliman and Melissa Gronlund will discuss how artists are engaging with technologies of automation, as well as the ever-increasing automation of the world. What new kinds of aesthetics, experiences and knowledge emerge. From interactive puppetry to robot choreography via the unconscious intent of algorithms, the artists discuss their ideas and work, and the complex concerns facing the current moment.

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Concrete, Alserkal Avenue

Curated by Karim Sultan

5 March - 1 April

UAE Unlimited, in collaboration with Alserkal Programming presents Ishara: Signs, Symbols and Shared Languages featuring works by 10 UAE-based artists Amna Al Dabbagh, Cheb Moha, Chndy, Dina Khorchid, Farah Al Qasimi, Flounder Lee, Nasir Nasrallah, Saba Qizilbash, Salem Al Mansoori, and Shaikha Al Ketbi, in addition to visual poetry by guest artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. The concept of the exhibition is derived from a broad understanding of the meaning and use of language. The curatorial process for the exhibition has been thematically informed by the idea of "lingua franca," which hints at constructed, second or third languages that were used to aid communication between various groups or in situations where communication was difficult.

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Screening and Discussion

Concrete, Alserkal Avenue

Wednesday 7 March, 7:00 pm

As part of the public programme for Ishara, guest artists Ramin, Rokni and Hesam will be in conversation with exhibition curator Karim Sultan to discuss ideas of communication, language and storytelling. This dialogue will explore the references accumulated by the artists, tracing their influences that relate to the theme of language and sign-making.

The screening will focus on Aakkaandi (2014-15) a 35 minute 17 second long video that depicts a pig-faced tourist-curator clutching a tote bag visit a tailoring shop to get a new dress copied. A doctor and his violently shushing nurse administer everything from injections to dental reconstruction. Improvised with Idrani Sirisena and Edward St, who live and work at the villa that the artists share, these short, simple vignettes are interspersed with the couple's recollection of the Sri Lankan Civil War and the political machinations that stoked the conflict. The work culminates in a collaboratively painted canvas that they steadily layer with Tamil lettering. Several sections of Aakkaandi were filmed by Edward St and many of the images in the film are inspired by the works of exiled Tamil poets, particularly 'The Aakkaandi Bird' by Shanmugam Sivalingan and '21 May 1986' by R Cheran.

Galleria d'Arte Moderna (GAM), Milan

Curated by Sara Raza, Paola Zatti, Omar Cucciniello

11 April - 17 June

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa at Galleria d'Arte Moderna (GAM) marks the final exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Featuring works by Lida Abdul, Abbas Akhavan, Kader Attia, Ergin Cavusoglu, Ali Cherri, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Rokni Haerizadeh, Susan Hefuna, Iman Issa, Gulsun Karamustafa, Hassan Khan and Ahmed Mater, this exhibition features a diverse range of artistic voices and critical concerns from a rapidly evolving region and its international diaspora. The exhibition offers a cross-circulation of ideas rooted in science, mathematics and philosophy and raises urgent issues of migration and displacement in areas around the world, including Italy. A selection of drawings from Haerizadeh's But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, which lent the exhibition its title will be presented.

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Louvre Abu Dhabi

Curated by Alia Zaal Lootah

Until 25 March

As part of the French-Emirati Cultural Programme, in collaboration with the Louvre Abu Dhabi, this exhibition is based on the collaboration between four artists living in the UAE and four well-known historical French manufacturers. Responding to the role of railways in the standardisation of time during the Industrial Revolution, Divecha introduces an intervention within the French Railway schedule as part of his collaboration with MTX - Broderie Architecturale. Through Saint-Lazare train station, a train journey from Paris to Rouen is captured by Claude Monet and revisited by Divecha in an attempt to question our perception of time.

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Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi

7 March - 24 June

Warehouse421 restages UAE's participation at two recent national exhibitions from the Venice Biennale's International Art Exhibition (2017) and International Architecture Exhibition (2016). Curated by Hammad Nasar, Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play features works by Vikram Divecha, Nujoom Alghanem, Sara Al Haddad, Lantian Xie and Dr Mohamed Yousif, and explores a strand of artistic practice in the UAE through the analogy of play.

Commissioned by the UAE Pavilion, the Haerizadeh brothers and Hesam Rahmanian fashioned a playground in book form, which is included in the accompanying catalogue and serves both as an additional site of the exhibition and as its speculative expansion featuring works over 40 pages by the artists.

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Gallery 5, Al Mureijah Square

Sharjah Art Foundation

Wednesday, 31 January

9:30 am - 5:00 pm

Coinciding with the major retrospective Hassan Sharif: I am the Single Work Artist, Sharjah Art Foundation is organising Hassan Sharif: Interexchange Symposium, which will host a group of critics and artists to explore Sharif's five-decade career.

The exhibition runs until Saturday, 3 February

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Booth C39

Palexpo Geneva

1 - 4 February

Preview: 31 January

We are pleased to participate in Art Genéve with works by German-Iranian artist Haleh Redjaian and Hassan Sharif. The booth highlights Sharif and Redjaian's critical approach of using the grid as a measurement tool and foundation for their compositions, allowing for chance and repetition.

Exhibition Dates:  4 January - 10 February, 2018

Alexander Gray Associates presents Hassan Sharif: Semi Systems, the Gallery's fourth exhibition of work by the artist (b.1951, Iran - d.2016, Dubai, United Arab Emirates). Focused on Sharif's use of the grid, geometry, and repetitive gesture, the exhibition includes work in a variety of media made as early as 1982 until his death in 2016.

Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Focus: Beyond Territory

Booth X1-12

8 - 11 November

Preview: 7 November

We are pleased to participate in Abu Dhabi Art with works on paper, paintings and objects by Hassan Sharif in Focus: Beyond Territory, the newly-added solo section curated by Omar Kholeif. Additionally, a large-scale work by Vikram Divecha will be featured in the main atrium of Manarat Al Saadiyat, alongside works by Mohammed Kazem from the Kisses series in Gateway, curated by Maya Allison.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde congratulates Rokni Haerizadeh for winning the OGR Award for his on going Fictionville series. The works were chosen for their engaging images that find overtones in the contemporary world. The artist extends the boundaries of painting to transform news, photographs and images of current events into mythological visions that reveal a corrupt circus of humanised beasts and other unreal creatures, all inserted in a fantasy landscape. Haerizadeh sees art in everyday life, without drawing boundaries between the two worlds. The international jury composed of Fawz Kabra, New York-based independent curator, Abaseh Mirvali, independent curator of contemporary art and architecture based between Mexico City and Berlin, and Nicola Ricciardi, artistic director of OGR - Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino, chose Haerizadeh's works from 206 galleries participating at Artissima. The exceptional approach taken by the OGR Award makes collaborations with the winning artist possible; to further explore enlightening and immersive artistic practices.

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Sharjah Art Foundation

Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi

4 November 2017 - 3 February 2018

In the making for several years, this landmark retrospective will include Hassan Sharif's diverse body of work from the early 1970s to 2016. On view in Al Mureijah Square and Bait Al Serkal, Arts Square, the exhibition will encompass Sharif's early newspaper caricature and comic strip drawings, Semi-System works, performances, paintings and 'urban archeology' objects.

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MACBA: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

28 October 2017 - 8 January 2018

Recipients of the second edition of Han Nefkens/MACBA prize, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian present a collaborative exhibition at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. The Maids is a multi-part exhibition created in response to the city of Barcelona, and the result of a two-year process the artists call "an assembling of a collective body." As artists, collaboration is central to their practice. Their goal is to create more equitable forms of artistic exchange by inviting different makers to contribute freely and independently to ongoing works in progress.

For their MACBA project, the artists sought out Joan Baixas, the famed Catalan puppet artist and stage director whose work they have long admired. They also extended invitations to artist Niyaz Azadikhah, who has been leading community-based women's sewing workshops in Tehran; John Cole, a robotics engineer who specialises in sensors; and an international group of writers, including Mandana Mohit and Sohrab Mahdavi.

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Villa Empain | Boghossian Foundation, Brussels

Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath

22 September 2017 - 18 February 2018

Taking its cue from John Berger's 1972 groundbreaking text on visual culture, the eponymous exhibition explores the various formalistic strategies that artists employ to re-configure our perception of the world. After its debut at ARTER, Istanbul, Ways of Seeing is on view at Villa Empain in Brussels and brings together works by 33 artists including Hassan Sharif's playful work Slippers (2016). The exhibition invites the viewer to investigate the manifold ways by which artists accord forms and concepts that are otherwise familiar with renewed appearances and meanings. Each of the artworks on display beckons us to take a second look, upon which the contours of a new reality begin to emerge.

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Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Until 19 March 2018

Mohammed Kazem presents works from his ongoing Space and Direction series in Hajj: Memories of a Journey that documents the legacy of the arduous and challenging routes that pilgrims travelled across continents, through the show's largest section dedicated to Journeys. Organised by Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Centre in collaboration with TCA Abu Dhabi, this exhibition coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Grand Mosque's opening.

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Focus, Booth D11

Randall's Island Park

5 - 7 May

Preview: 4 May

We are pleased to return to the sixth edition of Frieze New York with works by Emirati artist Hassan Sharif and Berlin-based Iranian artist Haleh Redjaian. The booth highlights the artists' critical approach of using the grid as a measurement tool and foundation for their composition, allowing for chance and repetition. Both Sharif and Redjaian's works are presented within a more formally and visually similar framework to investigate how this philosophy translates into their three-dimensional objects, hand-woven carpets and works on paper.

La Patinoire Royale, Brussels

Curated by Hervé Mikaeloff

Until 27 May

This exhibition renders an overview of Hassan Sharif's eclectic practice, from his early cartoons and performances to his recent paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations. The works included in the show continue his career-long investigation on where art can be found, what art is for, what our expectations are of it and how those limits can be usurped. "When I met Hassan in Dubai in 2014 and 2016, I discovered a few sketches of unrealised monumental sculptures that he later wanted to create for his exhibition at La Patinoire Royale. The scale of these Objects further reflects on Sharif's ideas of redundancy and uselessness," notes curator Hervé Mikaeloff. 

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Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai

Booth E6

15 - 18 March

We are pleased to participate in the 11th edition of Art Dubai with works by Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, Abdelkader Benchamma, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian.

Beirut Art Residency

Until 28 February

Abdelkader Benchamma will be in residence at the Beirut Art Residency, a live-work space for artists/collectives looking to develop projects in a stimulating environment. The goal of the program is to facilitate collaboration between international as well as local artists. During their time, residents are encouraged to diverge from their usual practice and experiment with new ideas with the comfort of knowing that they are not expected to produce finished work at the culminating Open Studio event. 

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NYUAD Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi

Curated by Maya Allison and Bana Kattan

2 March - 25 May

Hassan Sharif and Mohammed Kazem participate in But We Cannot See Them, an exhibition that surveys one of the most important artistic communities in the UAE's history with works by Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Abdullah Al Saadi, Hussein Sharif, Vivek Vilasini, Jos Clevers and Ebtisam Abdulaziz. Community has played a key role in every modern art historical breakthrough, with artists banding together around manifestos, or turning to one another for support when art institutions rejected their innovations. Art communities grow out of critical and creative exchange among peers and mentors. This exhibition focuses on one community of artists, sometimes called "the five", at an intersection of visual artists, writers, and filmmakers based in the UAE. Its members identified with a "new culture" of encouraging radical, formal and conceptual experimentation. Eventually, some of these artists founded the celebrated Flying House.

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Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Curated by Valerie Hillings, Sasha Kalter-Wasserman, Sarah Dwider and Maisa Al Qassimi

Beginning 8 March

Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority has commissioned Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian to create an immersive and interactive installation for the second exhibition of works from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi collection. Entitled Another Happy Day (2016-17), the installation emphasises the resonance of the past in the present and the power of representation across time by charting a historical continuum from the 1930s to today. The multi-room installation will feature site-specific paintings, videos, and artworks by artists including Nargess Hashemi and Laleh Khorramian and from the artists' art collection. It will take visitors on a journey through distinctive yet interconnected episodes or acts that offer reflections on the nature of art and how we represent ourselves and the world in which we live through words, images, gestures, and movement.

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Kunsthalle Zurich

Curated by Daniel Baumann

4 March - 7 May

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian participate in Speak, Lokal, a group exhibition that focuses on how artists worldwide investigate and broach local conditions. All sorts of artistic practices come into play, from activism to "archivism", from photography to graphic novels, from documentaries to performances and research based communal efforts. Paradoxically, the restricted and highly connoted territory of the Local is perceived as a place of autonomy and liberation, a space where precision is possible and needed to uncover discrepancies and make a difference. If Speak, Lokal is foremost an optimistic proposition, it does not gloss over the ambiguity of the Local as it neighbours on the dangerous territories of nationalism, provincialism, and commercialism - a trend typified in the well-known slogan "Buy Local!" Perhaps, after all, the Local is just a fiction (or a phantasy) - albeit a powerful one. The trio will premiere their new rotoscope animation From Sea to Dawn, which sees them print almost 3000 stills from news footage, paint on each of the printed images, photograph the results and stitch them together to form the 6 minute 21 second video. 

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Aga Khan Museum, Toronto

Curated by Fereshteh Daftari

Until 4 June

Rokni Haerizadeh participates in Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians, which looks at the use of power, humour, mysticism, and poetry in contemporary Iranian art to both openly and subversively critique subjects such as gender, politics, war, religion, and spirituality. Whether in Iran or in the diaspora, the artists' narratives have been informed by conditions triggered by the 1979 Revolution and by the pressures in the larger world. While some of the works in the exhibition reflect the socio-political tensions of the past 25 years, others transcend them to create all-embracing spaces free of strife.

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National Pavilion United Arab Emirates

57th Venice Biennale

Curated by Hammad Nasar

13 May - 26 November

The National Pavilion of United Arab Emirates at the 57th Venice Biennale presents works by five diverse artists including Vikram Divecha, Nujoom Alghanem, Lantian Xie, Sara Al Haddad and Mohamed Yousif. The exhibition will explore a strand of artistic practice in the UAE through the analogy of play. Featuring existing works, re-fabrication of 'lost' works and new commissions, the exhibition will stage a set of nested questions: Where does 'playfulness' in artistic practice come from? How and where is 'play' nurtured? What does 'play' do?

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National Pavilion United Arab Emirates

57th Venice Biennale

Curated by Hammad Nasar

13 May - 26 November

While the exhibition explores notions of 'playfulness' in artistic practice, the role of 'play' and how it is nurtured, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian will respond to this theme in the accompanying publication by overhauling a significant section of its pages. The book becomes an additional site of the exhibition and speculatively, its expansion. Through the hand of the three artists, a book is no more a book, relinquishing its original purpose to the conquering folds of a new work, which in turn spins a complex web of alternative images. The intervention will be at the fulcrum of their unique collaborative practice: characters fusing into one another, one artist may execute the ideas articulated by the others, the three often blurring together becoming composite.

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Mandalay Hall, Kochi

Curated by Mo Reda

Unil 25 March

Mohammed Kazem's Pepper House residency culminated in a group exhibition Residuals and the Anthology of Narcissism, where he presents new works from his Direction series alongside works by Emirati artist Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim. Running in parallel with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the exhibition is supported by the Kochi Biennale Foundation and Maraya Art Centre, and is part of the Trans-Indian Ocean Artist Exchange that aims to facilitate and stimulate artistic exchange between the different regions of the Trans-Indian Ocean.

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March Project 2016

Sharjah Art Foundation

Until 19 February

Vikram Divecha participates in the third edition of March Project 2016 exhibition, which features site-specific works developed by five artists during an educational residency programme. Divecha presents a new body of work, entitled Sweeping (2016) where he remaps the routes of five sweepers to converge towards the Sharjah Art Museum building. Every day a team of sweepers clean the streets of Al Shuwaihean neighbourhood that surrounds the museum building. Each sweeper is assigned a specific route, which they silently map while collecting the refuse in green trash bags and depositing them on the sidewalk to create a temporary public sculpture in sight of the museum building. The work disorders the waste management process and frames an encounter between the quotidian neighbourhood and the public institution that sits within it, enacted by the sweepers' routines and the detritus they sweep.

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Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Until 29 March

As part of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the satellite exhibition Binary States, India - UAE explores the bilateral relations between India and UAE across multiple disciplines, where Vikram Divecha presents Veedu (Malayalam for house), a film highlighting aspects of the strong community from Kerala living and working in the UAE. Building a house in their native city holds a lot of importance for these expats. These houses take many shapes, and are at times influenced by architecture from the Gulf. The remittances that are directed towards these houses take many forms - from aesthetics to arab-ness, from longing to pride. Following the design process of two house plans, this film will be shaped by exchanges between UAE-based clients and a Kerala-based architectural firm. Besides highlighting Emirati-Indian ties through various media and topics, the exhibition also celebrates the overlapping elements in Emirati-Indian cultures, which date back to decades of social, urban, and economic ties.

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Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Until 19 February 2017

Aisha Khalid presents a solo show Two Worlds as One at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. Inspired by Islamic mysticism, known as Sufism, Khalid focuses on issues such as women's roles, identity, power structures and Western preconceptions about her native Pakistan through detailed, poetic miniature patterns and sensuous works made out of textiles and embroidery. In this exhibition, she examines how familiar elements associated with safety, home and domesticity can be transformed in her imagery, taking on new - and very different - meanings.

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Centro Atlàntico de Arte Moderno - CAAM, Las Palmas

Curated by Katrin Steffen

Until 8 January 2017

Zoulikha Bouabdellah presents more than 30 works featuring drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, video and performance for her solo exhibition at CAAM. This exhibition marks Bouabdellah's largest solo in Europe, and traces her multidisciplinary practice echoing a profound historical and political significance, deeply rooted in formal and conceptual subtleties. The challenge of gender roles, social norms and taboos and of their influence on identity formation is a central theme in Bouabdellah's artistic creation. With a fine sense of subversive humour, she stands up against projections, stereotypes and clichés. Bouabdellah actively references European art history in order to focus on concepts of femininity and to provide re-interpretations.

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Hassan Sharif

Main Section

Booth Black 12

Oval, Lingotto Fiere, Turin

Preview and Vernissage: 3 November

4 - 6 November

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.

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

7 October - 19 February 2017

We are pleased to announce Aisha Khalid's solo show Two Worlds as One at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. Inspired by Islamic mysticism, known as Sufism, Khalid focuses on issues such as women's roles, identity, power structures and Western preconceptions about her native Pakistan through detailed, poetic miniature patterns and sensuous works made out of textiles and embroidery. In this exhibition, she examines how familiar elements associated with safety, home and domesticity can be transformed in her imagery, taking on new - and very different - meanings.

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Centro Atlàntico de Arte Moderno - CAAM, Las Palmas

Curated by Katrin Steffen

27 October - 8 January 2017

Zoulikha Bouabdellah presents more than 30 works featuring drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, video and performance for her solo exhibition at CAAM. This exhibition marks Bouabdellah's largest solo in Europe, and traces her multidisciplinary practice that has a profound historical and political significance, deeply rooted in formal and conceptual subtleties. 

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We are very pleased to announce that Vikram Divecha has joined the gallery's roster of artists.

Vikram Divecha (born 1977, Beirut) is a Mumbai-raised artist based in the UAE. He has developed a research-based, pedestrian practice in Dubai, where he is constantly negotiating for existing space, material and labour, to work with what he terms 'found processes' - forces and capacities that prevail in a society. Divecha works with urban processes and systems within state, social and industrial spheres and situates his practice in these operations to examine, intervene and extract the various layers of a given situation. In doing so, he withdraws himself from the final result to let the 'found processes' take over the works, which are not necessarily for the hermetic world of white cubes, but out in the streets and populated places. After introducing a set of parameters, Divecha engages in slow processes that would then evolve in an autonomous manner. Through his engagement with members of the community such as municipal gardeners, rock-blasting engineers, street sweepers and other diverse faculties, he creates idiosyncratic situations that translate into public art, permanent fixtures, sculptural installations and video works.

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We remember the life and artistic legacy of Hassan Sharif who passed away on Sunday, September 18, 2016 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates at the age of 65 years old. 

Sharif's exact date of birth is unknown, nor did it really matter to him. He didn't put stock in conventions of age, identity or the need for comfort. Only art and the restless making of art grasped his attention. He was a prolific cultural producer and facilitator, moving between roles as artist, educator, critic, activist, and mentor.

His career as an artist began in Dubai and Sharjah in the 1970s, working as a satirical caricaturist, highlighting a rapidly changing United Arab Emirates at the dawn of its formation. In 1979, Sharif is awarded a scholarship to the United Kingdom where he studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and returned five years later to the UAE, with the goal of establishing an art practice and building an audience for contemporary art in the Gulf region. The young country was an unlikely setting for an artist with a taste for provocation but his work found exactly the resistance that stimulated him. With determination, Sharif began a life-long pursuit to expand the definitions of art and the role of artists. 

For his earliest experimental work of the 1980s, Sharif brought friends to the edges of Dubai and they were the audience for his performances - jumping in the desert, tying rope between rocks - using apparently simple gestures to pointedly question ideals of technical skill, mastery, and accomplishment. Always questioning the functional and the useless, the found and the created, he transformed consumer products and waste into complex assemblages and weavings in his ongoing series "Objects". In these works, Sharif raised concerns about consumerism and social order, the human body and the physical evidence of our times. He was fascinated by the errors and flaws that arise in rigid systems, utilizing them in his large body of "Semi-system" drawings. Across his diverse work, he believed that flaws in such systems are ultimately creative ruptures.

Internationally recognized as a pioneer of conceptual art and experimental practice in the Middle East, Sharif served as a colleague and mentor to generations of Emirati artists. He believed that art was not only practice to be expanded and shared, but also a catalyst for community. In the early 1980's, he founded the Al Marijah Art Atelier in Sharjah, and was a founding member of the Emirates Fine Art Society and of the Art Atelier in the Youth Theater and Arts, Dubai. In 2005, he was one of four artists to establish The Flying House, a Dubai art space dedicated to promoting contemporary Emirati artists. The first Emirati to have his work shown in the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, Sharif was also among the selected artists to represent the U.A.E. during its first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Sharif's artwork is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, U.A.E.; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, U.A.E.; the Sittard Center, The Netherlands; and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, U.A.E., and Guggenheim, New York, U.S.A.

Hassan Sharif will be remembered for his gentle and generous spirit and his playful attitude. The legacy of his artistic journey will inspire artists and audiences, having left an indelible mark on Middle Eastern art history and the global art world.

For an Image, Faster Than Light

MOCA Yinchuan

Curated by Bose Krishnamachari

9 September - 18 December

We are pleased to announce Hassan Sharif and Mohammed Kazem's participation in the inaugural edition of Yinchuan Biennale, which will witness more than 80 international artists representing all facets of the global spectrum and from all parts (east-west, north-south) working on contemporary issues that the world has to contend with. The exhibition will be held on the premises of MOCA Yinchuan and will include an engaging display of artworks both inside and outside the museum. 

Following a 2-week long artist residency at the MOCA Yinchuan, Kazem will create two site-specific installtions, entitled Directions (Standing on Water) and Directions Yinchuan. 

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Tashkeel, Dubai

7 September - 13 October

During the year-long Critical Practice Programme 2015-16 at Tashkeel, Vikram Divecha closely collaborated with Debra Levine to present a project that questions positions of value through the context of time and money. Portrait Sessions invites a spectrum of self-identified 'non-professional painters' to become 'the artist' and to paint Divecha's portrait. The duration of each portrait session is determined by how much time AED 150 can buy according to each 'artist's' professional rate. Providing participants with a 65 x 50 cm primed canvas paper, acrylic paints and brushes, Divecha will be the only model during the sessions until the end of the exhibition on 13 October.

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Magazin4 - Bregenzer Kunstverein, Bregenz

Curated by Wolfgang Fetz and Jörg van den Berg

2 September - 20 November

German-Iranian artist Haleh Redjaian's solo at Bregenzer Kunstverein looks at the line and its subsequent multiplication by inviting the viewers to engage with its supposed regularity and then losing themselves in its underlying faults. By taking the line as a departure point in her works on paper, handwoven rugs and installations, Redjaian creates ornate, gridded patterns that suggest a rational tangibility of the world. Her work undermines any logical explanation and opens up to poetical interpretation. 

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2 – 4 June

Zoulikha Bouabdellah participates in Loop Art Fair in Barcelona and presents Envers/Endroit (Obverse/Reverse), which consists of an overlay, in the same plane, of scenes inspired by paintings that made a mark on Art History: Olympia by Edouard Manet, 1863, Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of her Sisters by an unknown artist from the School of Fontainebleau, 1594, and The Three Graces by Raphael, 1505. This juxtaposition of details from different paintings creates a visual dynamic in which feet meet a hand, sponging a leg, that itself seems to caress the cheek of a sleeping woman. 

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Seoul Art Space, Geumcheon

12 May - 23 June

Mohammed Kazem will take part in a six-week residency at Seoul Art Space in collaboration with Maraya Art Centre, during which Kazem will also participate in Geumcheon's Open Studios exhibitions.

Seoul Art Space is a creative space dedicated to visual art, remodeled in October 2009 from an old print works located in Doksan-dong. It provides the local community with an opportunity to enjoy culture through its various programmes. 130 visual artists (or teams) from 24 countries have moved in since it opened. Its programme includes exhibitions, workshops shared with with students and residents, and open studios. Maraya Art Centre's residency programme is designed to support emerging and mid-career contemporary UAE artists and designers. Working with institutions internationally, Maraya sends UAE-based artists overseas and hosts up to three residents per year. 

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9 July - 16 October 2016

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian have been commissioned to create a series of installations, performances and sculptures for Liverpool Biennial 2016. This will be realised through a wide range of media permeating throughout the city, with artwork revolving around the question "What if?", creating new narratives as audiences explore Liverpool Biennial. At Cains Brewery, they will create work on-site, using 'smuggled' objects shipped from Dubai to Liverpool by container.

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Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid

Until 3 June

We are pleased to announce Zoulikha Bouabdellah's third solo show at Sabrina Amrani gallery. In Objets de désir, Bouabdellah explores the space between the desire to possess and the object of desire itself. The object of desire does not exist in itself, but is its inaccessibility that gives value to it. The aura vanishes in the moment the object of desire is accessed, the platonic love is metabolised into a body, the fetish is emptied of meaning.

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Honolulu, Hawaii, USA 
Curated by Fumio Nanjo

Spring 2017 

We are pleased to announce Mohammed Kazem's participation in the inaugural Honolulu Biennial, which will be curated by Mori Art Museum's Fumio Nanjo and opens in Spring 2017.

The Honolulu Biennial Foundation (HBF) supports the local arts infrastructure with a global outreach and launches the Honolulu Biennial next year, which marks Hawaii's first entry into the international biennial circuit. The first edition of the Honolulu Biennial will focus on art from the Pacific, the Asian continent and the Americas. Throughout the year, HBF serves the local community by presenting educational outreach programs with an emphasis on programming for Hawaii's youth, focused on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math), as well as exhibitions for the local arts community. 

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22 - 24 April

Tour & Taxis, Brussels, Belgium  

Prime Booth B50

We are pleased to announce our participation in Art Brussels with a prime booth featuring works by Emirati artist Hassan Sharif and German-Iranian artist Haleh Redjaian, where a formal comparison will be drawn between the 3D weaving techniques and works on paper by both artists. The booth will be an investigation of Sharif and Redjaian's critical approach of using the grid as a measurement tool and foundation for their composition, allowing for chance and repetition. 

Solo Booth B50-S

The solo booth will centre on a video animation Letter! (2014) by Iranian artist Rokni Haerizadeh, which uses footage from a Femen protest, and shows how the protest is turned into its own hysterical, violent and performative spectacle once the gaze of the media is present. Haerizadeh refers to his videos as 'moving paintings' to emphasise the pulse of the video. He purposely doesn't refer to them as animations as he's not tracing a movement between frames, instead, each movement is enacted in these individual hand-painted frames to create an erratic pulse, and also merges thousand of individual paintings into one durational piece. 

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Guggenheim, New York, USA

Curated by Sara Raza

29 April - 5 October

But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise is the third exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative and borrows its title from the 24 recently-acquired drawings by Haerizadeh. The exhibition illuminates contemporary artistic practices in the Middle East and North Africa and the region's diaspora by presenting a selection of newly acquired works for the Guggenheim's permanent collection. Kazem will participate with a large scroll work, entitled Scratches on Paper, which was also part of the 12th Sharjah Biennial. Following its presentation in New York, the exhibition will travel to Istanbul's Pera Museum in 2017. 

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Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi, UAE
11 April - 10 May

Mohammed Kazem and Hassan Sharif participate in Portrait of a Nation, a group exhibition celebrating the 20 years of Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and featuring works by 50 Emirati artists. Divided in seven different thematic areas, the works explore topics of Nation and Unity, Geography and Nature, Architecture and Urbanism, Portraiture and Identity, Religion and Spirituality, Language and Calligraphy, and Tradition and Heritage. The exhibition captures the ever-changing face of the visual arts in the United Arab Emirates through a work from Sharif's Objects, which are sculptural assemblages constructed from mass-produced materials and created via random and arbitrary rules, and Kazem's performative work Photographs with a Flag, in which the artist stands next to small flags that neither represent countries, corporations or institutions, but are merely pieces of cloth in different colours, set into a space of ground in Dubai's Al Mamzar area. 

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7 April - 14 May 2016

Hassan Sharif presents a solo show at New York's Alexander Gray Associates, featuring sculptures and woven assemblages. Recognised as a pioneer of conceptual art and experimental practices in the United Arab Emirates over the past four decades, Sharif has transgressed traditional frameworks for art making by extending his practice to performance, installation, drawing, painting, and assemblage that integrates ordinary objects as the primary medium. The tapestry-like works in this exhibition are conceptually linked by their relationship with the human body and social structures. 

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Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, UAE
Booth E8

16 - 19 March

  
We are pleased to participate in the 10th edition of Art Dubai with works by Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian, Hassan Sharif, Haleh Redjaian, Mohammed Kazem and Xu Qu.

Published by Edition Patrick Frey
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian's Her Majesty? is a limited edition facsimile where the trio have completely overhauled the XL coffee table publication, which was published by Taschen Verlag in 2012 about the life of Queen Elizabeth II. Her Majesty? is now available at the gallery and each book comes with a unique, handmade cover of only 600 copies. 

For more information and to order a copy online, please click here.  

Main Entrance, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, UAE
Until 6 July
As part of Alserkal Avenue's Programming for Art Week 2016, Mohammed Kazem presents a site-specific installation My Neighbours, which consists of images from his 2006 photograph series of the same name. These photographs were taken over the course of several days looking outside from the artist's window in Al Quoz. A clothesline hangs at the bottom of each image, his neighbour's clothes hung out to dry, changing with every passing day. The only constant among the photos is a wide expanse of clear blue sky. In a city like Dubai, with very little public spaces, the sky holds out the promise of a shared space, a common that encompasses us all. 

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La Maison Rouge, Paris, France
Until 12 June

Bita Fayyazi participates in Ceramix at La Maison Rouge with her iconic ceramic Cockroaches installation, which was first exhibited at the 6th Biennial of Contemporary Ceramic Art in Tehran in 1998. With over 250 pieces from international museums and private collections, this exhibition presents works by 20th and 21st century artists such as Matisse, Rodin, Picasso, Thomas Schütte and Ai Weiwei, among others.

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IFEMA - Feria de Madrid, Spain

Booth 7D12

24 - 28 February

We are pleased to participate in the 35th edition of ARCOmadrid where Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian will present works from the Big Rock Candy Mountain series.

Much of the artists' work involves the appropriation of images and objects from magazines, markets, the Internet and mass media. In preparation for Big Rock Candy Mountain, they printed 1000 stills from news footage, painted on each of the printed images, photographed the results, and stitched them together to form the video. The source imagery depicts the destruction of cultural artefacts in war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq by individuals affiliated with the Islamic State (ISIS). By slowing down the imagery, the artists discover obscure details, relationships, and editing techniques that they intensify through their own manipulations, including doubling, collage, and figurative drawing.

Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey
Until 1 May
Ramin Haerizadeh participates in Memory and Continuity, which features works from the Huma Kabakci Collection that Nahit Kabakci began to put together in the 1980s. The collection is considered one of the most important examples of the few consciously created and well-sustained collections in Turkey. Preserved and upheld by two generations, the collection's affiliated and divergent points are brought to the fore in this exhibition.

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The Flying Saucer, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah UAE
Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi

Until 14 May 

As presented at the National Pavilion of the UAE in the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, 1980-Today: Exhibitions in the United Arab Emirates is now on view in Sharjah and looks at the history of exhibition making in the United Arab Emirates over the last 40 years. The emergence of art practices in the UAE is presented here through a selection of over 100 works by 15 Emirati artists.
The exhibition is built upon extensive research involving archives of newspaper articles, artists' writings, and catalogues, as well as interviews with artists and cultural practitioners. Reflecting personal and geopolitical trajectories, the research focused on the underexposed historical record and evolving practices of some of the UAE's most important modernist and contemporary artists.

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Fundación Banco Santander, Madrid, Spain 

Curated by Abdellah Karroum and Fatma Mostafawi

Until 19 June 

Hassan Sharif participates in Looking at the World Around You. Contemporary Works from Qatar Museums, which is held in collaboration with Madrid's Fundación Banco Santander.

The exhibition includes works that traverse nearly two centuries of artistic production across three continents. Conceiving of art as a way of looking at the world around you, of proposing a multitude of interpretations and ideas for changing perceptions, the exhibition is itself an invitation to look again and see anew; an invitation, in other words, to rethink the alignment of histories and how to make sense of the world today.

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Auditori Fundació Antoni Tàpies 

Aragó 255, 08007, Barcelona, Spain

8 February at 7.30 pm

We are pleased to announce Ramin & Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian's participation in Flow Series #2, where they will be in conversation with Rosa Lleo, founder of The Green Parrot. 

Flow Series a programme promoted by the Fundació Han Nefkens and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies with the aim of bringing together members of the art world from different continents and contexts. Encounters focussing on an artist and their ongoing work are the object of a conversation followed by a meal. An invitation to discuss the implications of a global dimension in the work of contemporary artists while sampling the edible creations of local artists. 

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Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE 

Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Until 23 March

We are pleased to announce Mohammed Kazem and Hassan Sharif's participation in Do It [In Arabic], in which more than 60 participating artists will create written instructions that will allow anyone to make a new work of art. The exhibition is a new iteration of Hans Ulrich Obrist's project, which began in Paris in 1993 as a conversation between Obrist, photographer Christian Boltanski and artist Bertrand Lavier. 

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Brunei Gallery, London, UK 

Curated by Amal Khalaf, Abdel Al Kadiri and Abdulnasser Gharem

Until 19 March

We are pleased to announce Mohammed Kazem and Hassan Sharif's participation in In Search of Lost Time. The exhibition, commissioned by The British Council in association with Brunei Gallery, presents works that explore the complex relationship between image, speed and time in the Gulf. In doing so, the exhibition aims to provoke a discussion about the role of art and culture in the region through the works of Rajaa Khalid, Jafar Islah, Sami Mohammed, Ahmed Mater, Abdallah Al Saadi, Ajlan Gharem, Camille Zakharia, Kazem, Sharif, Sophia Al Maria, Monira Al Qadiri, Lantian Xie, Mohammed Sharaf and Shaweesh. 

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ICA | The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, USA 

Organised by assistant curator Ruth Erickson with curatorial assistant Jeffrey De Blois

Until 27 March

The Birthday Party is the trio's first museum exhibition in the USA and borrows its title from a 1953 play by Nobel prize winning English writer Harold Pinter, a surreal comedy about a party organised as a ploy to get the character to sit down. The Haerizadeh brothers and Rahmanian began their version as a kind of a party-cum-performance in August at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde. During the performance, they shuffled around the space in costumes made of long prayer robes that obscured their vision, spilling paint across a floor they constructed, while unwrapping presents and making accumulative sculptures out of their contents. 
In the current installation at the ICA, they bring together some of the remnants from the performance - the painted floor, the sculptures, and the video documentation - with a number of new works and a selection of works by other artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Bahman Mohassess, Ree Morton and Hassan Sharif.

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Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Booth A16 

18 - 21 November 2015

We are pleased to participate in the seventh edition of Abu Dhabi Art with new works by Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem and Rokni Haerizadeh. Additionally, a large-scale copper sculpture by Sharif will be featured in the Beyond section, curated by Fabrice Bousteau, which aims to bring art to the public arena under the theme of Bliss.