Savita Apte has heralded several major creative initiatives all across the Middle East and Asia. The India native dons the hats of the Director of Art Dubai, Chairperson, Abraaj Capital Art Prize, Co-respondent, Venice Biennale and Co-Curator for Indian Highway Show, Serpentine Gallery. She is also an art historian, concentrating on Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art. In the mid-nineties, Apte was selected by Sotheby’s to act as a consultant/expert on Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art, with particular focus on their auctions in London and New York. She was involved is establishing the Sotheby Prize for contemporary Indian art. Whitewall sat down with Apte to find out her take on the third edition of Art Dubai and the city’s budding art community.
WHITEWALL: How would you describe the transitions made from year to year at Art Dubai?
SAVITA APTE: The first year we had a nucleus of an art fair and the beginning of an art forum. I think what we realized that by the second year we could develop both much further. Last year we had a bigger art fair, global art forum, and we had a tiny art park, which was a new initiative for us, and a country pavilion. This year we have been incredibly confident in all of those things. So now we have a brilliant art fair, far more collateral with our media partners, a bookshop and the country pavilion which was hugely successful last year when we featured Pakistan, while this year we have featured Palestine. We also expanded our art park by three times, and within the art park we had several curated video shows, which gave a platform to lots of foundations in the region. The global art forum was again bigger and better, with a day in Paris and one in Doha.
WW: What are some of the challenges Art Dubai is still facing?
SA: The biggest challenge for us was space. Even if we wanted to grow the art fair we really couldn’t as we are limited by the physicality of the space. We are also limited by the sheer physicality of having so much outdoor space. We would love to use it all, but it does mean that we need to have art works that are weather proof in their own right. It becomes a constant curatorial tightrope walk for us, trying to find the best projects that fit into the scheme of things here.
WW: How did your involvement Abraaj come about?
SA: Abraaj came onboard as sponsors for our second fair. They are very committed to social responsibility and one of the things they wanted to get more involved in was thought leadership. The project that both of us came up together with was the art prize which allowed artists from the MENASA (Middle East North Africa South Asia) region to work with an international curator. Artists from this region typically produce works for commercial galleries. Those galleries by force have small spaces, so the artists have become forced to produce work that is limited in size and always saleable. If they have dreams or ambitions we never know about them. It’s only the few artists that may, say 20 years from now, get noticed by someone and get picked up by some gallery.
What we wanted to do was allow these artists to dream and then to challenge themselves as well, which is why the international curators came in to push the artists’ boundaries. Artists from this region are very well versed with spirituality, myths, mysticism, and religion, and often take that for granted. Sometimes it takes someone to become self-reflexive and wonder why we use certain symbols to project certain images. It’s quite a wonderful balance to push both boundaries. There is this general attitude that there isn’t much coming out of the region, but it’s actually very fertile artistically.
There is an attitude that there isn’t much coming out of the region
WW: The growth of the art scene in Dubai has been very organic, yet there are all these new government initiatives like the UAE pavilion in the Venice Biennale. How do you see the two coming together?
SA: I don’t think they are divergent at all. The initiatives are all confluent. They all form one big river of artistic excellence. I welcome all the initiatives because it’s been a while for all these initiatives to come into being and the more there are the better it is for the artistic and creative community here.
WW: How does one grow the artistic community here when the overwhelming lifestyle here is tied to the corporate world?
SA: There are several layers to that. If you want to come as an artist from an international country its still difficult for the reasons you mentioned, but in part that is because there isn’t enough of a creative outlet for the artists that are already here. If you are an artist here you have several roadblocks. Very often families find having a child as an artist is not something that is a socially acceptable thing to declare. That’s changing with Tashkeel (an arts organization run by one of the daughters of the Ruler of Dubai) and the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, which pushes you up a couple of notches in everyone’s eyes.
The second layer is the galleries. There are many more galleries that have opened which means that there are many more art personnel required. Many artists work in galleries often during the day and work on their works when the galleries aren’t open. So that allows for a wonderful interface between what an artist does creatively and what they do to make ends meet. All of that art infrastructure and art network, which really started three years ago, has just recently started to take hold. It will get easier and less complicated for artists to begin to have a community here.
WW: My dream is that some of these housing projects, which are empty, will become housing projects for artists.
SA: It’s not too far from some of the plans we have ourselves.
