The past decade or so has seen a concerted effort to retrofit a national art-historical narrative for the United Arab Emirates. It began, as these things tend to, with men—with Hassan Sharif and other members of the Emirati avant-garde of the 1980s and ’90s, dubbed The Five. Only in the past few years—in a belated corrective to the corrective—has consideration turned to the women who were their contemporaries but received considerably less attention. Chief among them is Nujoom Alghanem, who in 2019 became the first woman to represent the country at the Venice Biennale. She is known for her meditative films that sensitively unspool the textures and timbres of Emirati life, and is considered one of the most important national poets, particularly in her then-radical experiments with prose poetry and free verse from the ’80s on. This retrospective, “Unframed,” brought together nearly three decades of her rarely seen paintings, alongside a new series of photographs—film stills overlaid with lines of poetry. These blandly attractive works reminded us of the two sources of her renown.
Alghanem is no great painter, it turns out, yet the show was remarkably compelling all the same. Her narrative films and documentaries are primarily character driven. Most often, they focus on women as both subject and protagonist, as in Nearby Sky (2014), her portrait of the first Emirati female camel breeder to enter camel beauty pageants and races, showing the challenges she faces in a male-dominated industry. Throughout Alghanem’s cinematic oeuvre, there is a sense of a torch passing, of last men and pioneering women. Another of those women is the nearly ninety-year-old Bedouin healer of Hamama (2010). But the lovingly shot landscape, too, is ever present as a silent yet somehow eloquent character; in Alghanem’s mostly unpeopled paintings, it comes to the fore.
Rather than being laid out chronologically, “Unframed” proceeded chromatically, with jaundiced browns giving way to gray blues in a series of maritime scenes, followed by the reds and yellows of car lights streaking by in new works that depict Dubai in the rain. The earliest works on view come from the mid-’90s, when Alghanem left a career in journalism to study film in Ohio. She experienced autumn for the first time; the small mixed-media canvases from this period are studies in russets and ochers. Some—such as the mantis-headed A Man from Mars and Spirits of Mars, both 1995, in which shadowy figures seem to dance around a fire—integrate scraps of rough burlap to suggest figuration. Their titles reflect a fascination with both animist beliefs and the wave of Mars landings happening at the time. Others, such as The Actress of That Scene, 1994, and Spirits of the Garden, ca. 2001–2002, use jute thread to trace outlines of bodies, like a fibrous Photoshop Find Edges filter.
Emirati artists of Alghanem’s generation have been preoccupied with the fast-encroaching transformation of their country. Her paintings, too, convey a sense of existing in an interstitial no-man’s-land—between fast-disappearing history and a future that threatens to steamroll the traditional ways of being that animate films such as Sounds of the Sea (2014), which traces the final journey of a renowned singer of sailors’ songs, or Between Two Banks (1999), about the last remaining boatman rowing the traditional ferry across Dubai Creek. It is encapsulated in Between Two Shores, 2022–23, a large painting of eight spectral figures hovering over the creek, seemingly in a barzakh, or limbo, between the past and the interminable present.
— Rahel Aima
