Meet Abdullah Al Saadi: The conceptual artist

Abdullah Al Saadi loves to travel. The Emirati artist has embarked on numerous journeys across this country and internationally, especially on one of his preferred modes of travel: his bicycle. Each time he travels, he carries with him his notebook, and scribbles and draws, documenting the world around him not only for himself but for others to later behold and experience through his work. For instance, his 2015 work The Silk Journey was in the form of a 10-day ride through the eastern part of the UAE and Oman, including Madha, Khor Fakkan, Dibba and Wadi Bih.

Al Saadi is the artist chosen this year to represent the United Arab Emirates at the Venice Biennale, the prestigious global art event where the UAE has participated since 2011. The exhibition, titled ‘Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia’, runs like the Biennale, until November 24th, and presents eight bodies of Al Saadi’s work of which two were especially created for the Biennale.

The show is being curated by Tarek Abou El Fetouh, director of performance and senior curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, with whom Al Saadi has recently collaborated on a public intervention in Expo 2020 Dubai with his exhibition titled ‘Terha’ which was drawn from the artist’s experience with the UAE’s natural environment. For the work, Al Saadi went out into Wadi Tayyibah and camped there until he felt at one with the surrounding environment. He brought a poem with him and reflected on it at the same time as he did the beauty and mystery of the desert landscape before him. This led him to select the stones to use to create the work.

“The artistic relationship with nature found in Al Saadi’s work has existed in the Arabian Peninsula for centuries,” explains El Fetouh, noting the work of pre-Islamic poets to the time of the Abassids. “The show presents important components of collective memory through Al Saadi’s work by looking at how the artist, poets before him and contemporary thinkers thought about sites of memory.”

Born in 1967 in Khor Fakkan, a rugged town on the eastern coast of the UAE where he continues to be based, Al Saadi graduated from Al Ain University with a degree in English literature before going on to study Japanese painting in Kyoto.

Since the 1980s, he has created work connected to the landscapes of the Arabian Peninsula. One of the UAE’s pioneering conceptual artists, Al Saadi has played an important role in the Gulf countries’ evolving art scene. His work is multidisciplinary and includes painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, photography as well as copious amounts of collecting and cataloguing found objects and even in some instances the creation of new alphabets.

“Abdullah’s central position within the art history of the UAE is also reflected in his participation in two previous National Pavilion UAE group exhibitions, in 2011 and 2015,” Laila Binbrek, director of the National Pavilion UAE, said in a statement. “It is incredibly gratifying to include his work once again in this year’s Pavilion, this time for a solo exhibition.”

Al Saadi’s multifaceted work is at the same time intimately personal and collective, representative of the greater UAE community, culture and natural landscape, is also inspired by his family life and the relationships forged between individuals and their natural environment as well as companionship.

“Since I was a student, four decades ago, art has been an integral part of my daily life,” Al Saadi said. “My art is the result of interactions with places, people, ideas, and aesthetics that I encounter every day where I live and in my journeys. I find myself driven to document these experiences visually or in written diaries and contemplations, seeking to transfigure the ordinary with the passage of time.”

The exhibition’s curation eloquently reveals Al Saadi’s artistic process, connection with nature and his belief in camaraderie. It also sheds light on his significance to the growth of the UAE’s art scene.

As El Fetouh explained, Al Saadi’s works are inspired by his passionate longing for immersion in nature through which he constructs a unique relationship with landscapes, which goes beyond what is recognised and familiar. However, as El Fetouh emphasises: “It was very important also to show that Abdullah is not actually documenting the landscape or offering a nostalgia for pre-modern Emirates but creating his subjective world.”

“The exhibition attempts to invite the audience to enter into this subjective world by looking at the landscapes and his depiction of nature as an artistic approach,” he says. “It strives to look at his subjective world in terms of what is the collective memory of this region and what it includes because not all spatial components of what he sees are depicted in these drawings and paintings on show.

“Al Saadi,” explains El Fetouh, “carefully and intellectually and sincerely selects what sites he keeps and what sites he forgets. It all depends on the journey, like in the Sufi journey, or The Purl and Silk Journey, or on the footsteps of Camar Cande.”

Displayed are works that capture a revisitation of a landscape he already visited. Journeys to a similar place allowed him to see it in different manner, also depending on how he visited them, for example, with his donkey and dog or via car.

Of note are works such as The Purl and Silk Journey (2015), which features long vertical scrolls that the artist produced in 2015 during two journeys to the eastern part of the UAE, close to Khor Fakkan. For the first part of the work, the artist contemplated on the mountainous landscape of Wadi Madha by drawing and writing on long scrolls. He then viewed the region’s green valleys and thought about ideas of health and vitality.

On view is also Camar Cande’s Journey (2010), a trek Al Saadi took through the northern region of the United Arab Emirates leading him to produce 151 intricate watercolour paintings on his travels. “As he is traveling, Al Saadi begins to draw, paint and write while he is surrounded and immersed in nature—this experience is vital to his artwork and helps him create,” said El Fetouh. “He creates in much the same way as the classical Arab poets did their classical poets—by becoming one with nature.”

Sometimes, says the artist, he scribbles in his diary, drawing maps of the surrounding area. Other times he takes pictures with his camera. All of it serves as a vital artistic archive—an archive that serves the basis of his work as presented in Venice.

Performance and storytelling are key elements of Al Saadi’s œuvre. During the opening of the pavilion, professional actors from the UAE and interns presented artworks in the form of scrolls and other items stored in colourful local traditional Arabian metal chests. Upon presenting the works, each performer explained the work, Al Saadi’s process and how it relates to the UAE and larger Arab world and tradition particularly of Arab poets.

The works that are on view in Venice offer a gateway into the experience of the artist’s inner world prompted by his exploration of the outer world—the UAE landscape—humbling produced to document awe and wonder of the Arabian natural landscape.

As Al Saadi explained, “I am representing myself in Venice first as an artist and secondly as an Emirati one. This pavilion showcases my artistic journey since leaving university. Since then, art has become an integral part of my daily life. My art is led by my desire to document the world around me and document my experiences visually and through written diaries. The art both preserves and transcends the passage of time.”