Dubai Art Week: It was a visual blast, says art student upon return

Eleven students who attended the event come back to tell the tale.

KARACHI: It was a visual blast and simply put, an overdose of art. This is how Mahvish, one of the 11 students of Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture who attended the Dubai Art Week from March 18 to March 24, summarised her experience.

Accompanied by faculty members, the students attended Sharjah Biennial, Art Dubai, Design Days Dubai, Sikka Art Fair, and the art districts of alSerkal Avenue and DIFC, Dubai. The art week is held every year and was attended by more than a 100 architects and artists this year. On Tuesday, the students gathered at Fomma Trust’s art centre in Zamzama Park to recall all they learnt and experienced during the art week. The talk was a part of ‘Springboard Series’ talks organised by an art journal, ArtNow. The gallery also displayed a slideshow of the art pieces the students saw during the event.

“We did things we could never have imagined,” Mahvish added. She spoke about the experience of working in a professional environment. “We work in our pyjamas over here but over there, they gave us overalls and gloves to work with.” She also spoke about how they got to see the commercial side of art. “Artists in Pakistan don’t have much to work with and they have to make do with what they have,” she said. “But the artists over there had everyone at their beck and call.”

The discussion opened with remarks by Fawzia Naqvi, editor in chief and CEO of ArtNow, on the events and activities that take place at Fomma DHA Art Centre.

The presentation was followed by ‘Accumulation’, a multi-sensory performance and installation by Zeerak Ahmed. The performance is a two-artist collaboration that seeks to examine the sacred transformation and relationship of objects. This process-based performance, carried out by artists Abdullah Tariq Khan from Paris and a counterpart mixed media artist Ahmed from Karachi, ran simultaneously in Paris, France and Karachi.

By depicting different reflections and interpretations of the same idea, Accumulation was a conceptually identical but geographically disparate experiment taking place at the same time in two different locations. Ahmed and Khan explored how each artist perceives and collects items based on ideas of memory and perception.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 2^nd, 2013.