All posts filed under: In conversation

In conversation: FNND with Paula Naughton and Clement Siatous | Part 2

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Clement Siatous was born in 1947 on the Chagos Islands, a small isolated archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean. He spent most of his childhood on the island of Diego Garcia until he and his family were forcibly evicted. The entire population of the islands was expelled by the British Government to make way for a US naval base in 1973. The base on Diego Garcia, also known as Camp Justice or Footprint of Freedom has become one of the most strategic, integral bases for the US global War on Terror and known as a transit site for CIA rendition exercises. 

The UK Government has been accused of creating the fiction that a permanent population never existed on the Chagos Islands. This claim was made easier to uphold due to sparse photographic documentation that until recently mainly existed in dispersed military and government archives. As with many evicted Chagossians, compelled to leave their belongings behind, Siatous had no documentation of his heritage. In direct response to the continued political denial, he began to …

In conversation: FNND with Paula Naughton and Clement Siatous | Part 1

Published by

Clement Siatous was born in 1947 on the Chagos Islands, a small isolated archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean. He spent most of his childhood on the island of Diego Garcia until he and his family were forcibly evicted. The entire population of the islands was expelled by the British Government to make way for a US naval base in 1973. The base on Diego Garcia, also known as Camp Justice or Footprint of Freedom has become one of the most strategic, integral bases for the US global War on Terror and known as a transit site for CIA rendition exercises. 

The UK Government has been accused of creating the fiction that a permanent population never existed on the Chagos Islands. This claim was made easier to uphold due to sparse photographic documentation that until recently mainly existed in dispersed military and government archives. As with many evicted Chagossians, compelled to leave their belongings behind, Siatous had no documentation of his heritage. In direct response to the continued political denial, he began to …

In conversation V: Hassan Sharif

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Hassan Sharif lives and works in Dubai. He has made a vital contribution to conceptual art and experimental practice in the Middle East through 40 years of performances, installations, drawing, painting, and assemblage. In his early artistic maturation, Sharif rejected calligraphic abstraction, which was becoming the predominant art discourse in the region in the 1970s. Instead, he pursued a pointedly different art 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, London, in 1984 and returned to the UAE shortly after. He set about staging artistic 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 into engaging with contemporary art discourse. In addition to his own practice, Sharif has encouraged and supported several generations of artists in the Emirates. He is a founding member of the Emirates Fine Art Society (founded 1980) and of the Art Atelier …

In conversation IV: Bharti Kher

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Bharti Kher was born in the UK in 1969. She studied painting, graduating in 1991 from Newcastle Polytechnic. At 23, she moved to New Delhi in India, where she lives and works today. Her work encompasses painting, sculpture and installation, often incorporating found material, using them to transform objects and dissolve the distinction between two and three dimensions. Sculptures she has made since the mid-2000s combine animal with human body parts to create hybrid female figures that confront the viewer with a compelling mixture of sexuality and monstrosity. In contrast, her bindi ‘paintings’ are abstract and aesthetic, turning the mass-produced consumerist items into artworks of sumptuous beauty. Her work is engaged with the readymade, minimalism and abstraction (through repetition), mythology and narratives. Solo exhibitions include Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014); Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London (2012); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Virus, Gateshead, England (2008). She has taken part in numerous group exhibitions at various institutions including Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi, India Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Canadian …

In conversation III: Kate Fowle

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Kate Fowle is chief curator at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and director-at-large at the Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York. Previously she was executive director of ICI (2009-13), the inaugural international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2007-08) and chair of the Master’s Program in Curatorial Practice, which she co-founded in 2002 for California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Before moving to the United States Fowle was co-director of smith + fowle in London and curator at the Towner Art Gallery and Museum in Eastbourne, East Sussex (1994-96). Fowle is the guest contemporary galleries curator for the ninth edition of Art Dubai. The fair takes place March 18-21, 2015 and presents a select yet diverse line-up of around 90 galleries from the UAE and around the world, across three programmes: ‘Contemporary’; ‘Modern’, devoted to masters from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia; and ‘Marker’, a curated section of art spaces that focuses each year on a particular theme or geography. Art Dubai hosts …