One of Many Stories

Opening on Saturday, April 15 2017 from 4pm to 9pm

The Free Worshop, Aden, between 1976 and 1978. Courtesy: Abdallah Obeid

ONE OF MANY STORIES

Art Worlds in Yemen

Hashem Ali, Abdallah al-Ameen, Boushra Almutawakel, Yasser al-Ansi, Elham al-Arashi, Archives of the news­paper 14 October (Aden), Nasser al-Aswadi, Ali Baraas, Contemporary Art Group, Mohamed Abdo Dail, Ali al-Dharhani, Amal Fadhel, Ali Abdo al-Faqiyya, Fine Arts Institute (Aden), the Free Workshop (Aden), French Center for Archeology and Social Sciences (Sana’a), Bayt al-Halaqa, Abbas al-Junaydi, Kawn Foundation (Sana’a), Ahmed al-Kharazi, Guillaume Merere, Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Yemen, Fuad al-Muqbil, Talal al-Najjar, Amna al-Nassiri, Abdallah Obeid, Marine Poirier, Reema Qasem, Nasser al-Qawi, Farid Sameed, The Atelier (Sana’a), Soviet Cultural Center (Aden), Jameel Subay, Murad Subay, Surikov State Academy Art Institute (Moscow), Union of Visual Artists, Abdul Rahman Taha, Awraq al-Tashkiliyya, Jacques Veerman, Ali Mohamed Yahya, …

Curator: Anahi Alviso-Marino

Exhibition view of "One of many stories", Villa Vassilieff, Paris, 2017. Cosmopolitanism and exchanges. Image: Aurélien Mole.

By tracing both per­sonal and col­lec­tive tra­jec­to­ries to ques­tion the role of the artist in Yemeni society, One of Many Stories seeks to restore the mul­tiple art worlds in con­tem­po­rary Yemen. This soci­o­log­ical ques­tion is artic­u­lated throughout the con­stel­la­tion of doc­u­ments and art­works pre­sented in the exhi­bi­tion and through dif­ferent approaches: How does one become an artist in Yemen? How is this pro­cess his­tori­cized? What is the rela­tion­ship between Yemeni artists and state insti­tu­tions? How do they attempt to con­test or cir­cum­vent author­i­tarian power? How do Yemeni artists relate to the rest of the world?

Yemen, sit­u­ated at the South Western point of the Arabian Peninsula, is one of the poorest coun­tries of the region and is his­tor­i­cally marked by great polit­ical insta­bility. Today, it is branded by the media cov­erage of vio­lence, ter­rorism and civil war. Often, the ques­tion “is there Yemeni art?” sum­marises the var­ious inter­ro­ga­tions that emerge in orga­nizing an exhi­bi­tion about Yemen’s art worlds. The ques­tion itself reveals a lack of avail­able tools to appre­ciate modern and con­tem­po­rary Yemeni visual art, par­tic­u­larly when the observer is for­eign, under­stands dif­ferent aes­thetic val­oriza­tions, and when there is a vir­tual absence of sources on this field. The exhi­bi­tion thus seeks to rec­tify this by pre­senting a rich, varied and eclectic source of doc­u­ments.

Collected during field­work con­ducted from 2008 to 2011 as part of a doc­torate in polit­ical soci­ology, the exhib­ited doc­u­ments were donated either by artists or were part of mate­rials that were recorded, pho­tographed and archived during this research. By studying and exhibiting these doc­u­ments and by proposing to observe through them the inter­de­pen­dences between artists and polit­ical actors, the exhi­bi­tion pro­poses a dif­ferent image of Yemen. These col­lab­o­ra­tive and com­pet­i­tive inter­de­pen­den­cies reveal under­lying rela­tions of dom­i­na­tion, whose mech­a­nisms can be, and have been, cre­ative and pro­duc­tive. While indeed state insti­tu­tions play a fun­da­mental role in the emer­gence of artistic scenes in Aden and Sana’a, artists equally accom­pany this cre­ation, con­sol­i­da­tion and ques­tioning of polit­ical regimes. For instance, cer­tain artists rep­re­sent the ideals of the Socialist polit­ical pro­ject in former South Yemen; they pro­ject and mate­ri­alize Yemen’s unity through paint­ings and posters, or they doc­u­ment through pho­tog­raphy the con­tentious mobi­liza­tions of 2011.
Other ele­ments emerge from the gaps that appear while recon­structing a his­tory of art worlds and their inter­ac­tions with polit­ical powers and social order. The per­sonal tra­jec­to­ries of Yemeni artists are one of such ele­ments — the journey of Hashem Ali and Ali Ghaddaf to Kuwait in the 1970s, Elham al-Arashi’s edu­ca­tion in Moscow in the 1980s, the cre­ation of the al-Halaqa group in Sana’a in the 1990s, Jameel Subay’s involve­ment in the con­tentious mobi­liza­tions of 2011, the ongoing street art cam­paigns ini­ti­ated by Murad Subay. These micro-his­to­ries, which are retraced using a series of doc­u­ments, high­light sin­gular indi­vid­u­al­i­ties and com­plex and cos­mopolitan artistic tra­jec­to­ries.

The exhi­bi­tion implic­itly reveals the com­plex­i­ties of retracing an art his­tory of a country stuck in war – the esca­la­tion of armed con­flict since the end of 2014 and the begin­ning of 2015 has devel­oped into a civil war, inten­si­fied by the mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion led by Saudi Arabia and a coali­tion of coun­tries sup­ported by by France among other states. Some of the exhib­ited doc­u­ments and art­works bear the mark of their his­tory – Amna al-Nassiri’s slightly dam­aged painting and Talal al-Najjar’s draw­ings that were forced to be pre­served out­side of Yemen – and, equally, the absence of other under­lines the dif­fi­culty of con­tin­uing field­work in such a con­text. With the impos­si­bility of knowing what remains from the cur­rent bomb­ings in Yemen, a simple pho­to­copy thus changes its status, becoming as valu­able as an orig­inal doc­u­ment, facing the same pos­si­bility of destruc­tion.