Anuar Khalifi, Ghurba, acrylic on canvas.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

The Third Line gallery, Dubai, has announced a group exhibition of works by Anuar Khalifi, Sara Naim and Sophia Al Maria at Cromwell Place, London (2-9 June, 4 Cromwell Place, London, United Kingdom).

Featuring painting, sculptural photography and video, the exhibition provides unconventional insights into identity, image-making and history, while probing the relationship between human memory and the material world. Khalifi’s paintings, which will concurrently be presented in an online exhibition, examine identity through the blending of real and imaginary worlds. The semi-autobiographical portraits are born from the artist’s mind. Inspired chiefly by current events, he depicts recognisable moments in present and past collective memory and superimposes his feelings and reactions about them.

He physically and metaphorically inserts himself in the picture, and by extension, challenges representation as well as social and political responses to these events. His clever manipulation of modernist painting techniques and the genre of portraiture play a critical role in challenging representation in art and asserting presence in cultural institutions: he re-writes art history. Self-taught, he has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions in the Middle East, Europe and North Africa including, among others, Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste, Musée National de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris (2021); Personal Mythologies, Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris (2020) and Forever Is A Current Event, The Third Line, Dubai (2019).

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His work has been acquired by MACAAL, Musée d’Art contemporain africain Al-Maaden, Marrakech, Morocco. Naim’s sculptural photographs explore the notion of boundary and the way it shapes our perception. Using scientific tools to study micro formations, she explores the lack of boundary between things and highlights the sinuous line between perception and reality. Presented in the exhibition is a selection from two recent bodies of work: Reaction and Tingling, Throbbing, Waves.

The latter explores the materialisation of emotions and bodily sensations, with each artwork being composed of felt sensations and abstract gestures that create solid, physical forms.

 Video still from Sophia Al Maria’s work The Blood Clot.

During various Vipassana (to see things as they really are, one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation), sessions guided by Naim, she asked the sitters to draw their sensations, which she then detail-selected, magnified, printed and shaped to inform her photographic sculptures. The act of physically, mentally and emotionally translating sensations into form, addresses the blurred boundary between imagination and perception. Reaction consists of sculptural photographs that magnify a small area of polaroid film, exposing the random microcosms formed by chemical reactions with light, which are the basis of analogue photography.

Naim emphasises the process of photography at the molecular level by rendering these two-dimensional scans into organic three-dimensional shapes, raising questions about the medium and image making as a whole. She received her MFA in Fine Art Media at The Slade School of Fine Art, London (2014), completed her Bachelors in Photography from London College of Communication (2010) and Art Foundation at Chelsea College of Art (2007).

She has exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions; Science Fictions, Centre Photographique Rouen, Rouen, France (2019); Building Blocks, The Third Line, Dubai (2019); Tribe: Contemporary Photography from the Art World, Katzen Arts Center, Washington DC, USA (2018) and The Third Image (Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe Contemporain), Institut du Monde Arab and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Galerie Binome, Paris, France (2017). Al Maria’s film Limerent Object II acts as a trance-inducing tone poem meditating on deep time and history. Part of the Limerent Object series, the video explores myths and the life cycle of the world, including the ruins of an apocalyptic future — a recurring theme in her sci-fi-influenced practice.

The video, originally commissioned in 2019 for Faena Art in Miami, is being presented in a fireplace towards which the viewer is drawn and transfixed. An artist, writer and filmmaker, she received her MFA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. With musician Fatima Al Qadiri, she coined the concept of Gulf Futurism to describe how the future as imagined by the West has already become reality in the Gulf. Her work has been shown in various international exhibitions, including Bitch Omega, Julia Stoschek, Dusseldorf, Germany (2020); Beast Type Song, Tate Britain, London (2019); Sophia Al-Maria: BCE, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019); Biennale of Moving Images, Miami, USA (2017); Black Friday, Whitney Museum, New York (2016); The 9th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012) and many more.

It has been acquired by international institutions and foundations, including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA; Art Jameel, Dubai, UAE; MATHAF, Doha, Qatar and Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE. The Third Line says it is pleased to participate in this first ever pop up event by Abu Dhabi Art at Cromwell Place in London, bringing together four galleries from the UAE, namely, Tabari Artspace, Isabelle Van Den Eynde, Lawrie Shabibi and itself, alongside an exhibition of Beyond: Emerging Artists by Abu Dhabi Art. It thanks Abu Dhabi Art and the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi, for their support of the collaborative event.

Founded in 2005, The Third Line is a Dubai-based art gallery that represents contemporary artists locally, regionally and internationally. It also hosts non-profit, alternative programmes to increase interest and dialogue in the region. Represented artists include Abbas Akhavan, Anuar Khalifi, Ala Ebtekar, Amir H Fallah, Farah Al Qasimi, Farhad Moshiri, Fouad Elkoury, Hassan Hajjaj, Hayv Kahraman, Huda Lutfi and Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Laleh Khorramian, Lamya Gargash, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Pouran Jinchi, Rana Begum, Sara Naim, Sophia Al Maria, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Youssef Nabil and Zineb Sedira.