“Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia,” Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates, 60th Venice Biennale, 2024

When young Abu Nuwas aspired to become a poet, his teacher guided him through (or tricked him into) an exercise that in ​present-day​​​​​ terms might be called a process of “unlearning.” A popular parable tells the story of how Abu Nuwas became a seminal figure of classical Arabic poetry in the 8th century CE: ​​​​His teacher, ​​​​​​Abu Muhriz Khalaf al Ahmar, master poet of the early Abbasid court, first instructed him to learn one thousand poems by heart and then – after Abu Nuwas recited the verses to eagerly prove his accomplishment – told him he would have to forget them all. It was only after young Abu Nuwas had confined himself to a monastery for months, erasing from his mind all he had memorized, that he was finally given licence to compose.

For Tarek Abou El Fetouh, curator of the United Arab Emirates’ pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, this story serves as an apt introduction [1] to Emirati artist Abdullah Al Saadi’s solo exhibition “Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia,” not just as a means to establish the notions of forgetting, unlearning, or even erasure as organizing principles of the construction of individual and collective memory. It also supports the exhibition’s approach toward presenting Al Saadi’s work through a twofold statement: on the one hand, highlighting the artist’s affinity with the tradition of the classical, pre-Islamic Arab poets and their pilgrimages of immersion into the Peninsula’s naturescapes while, on the other hand, underscoring his position as a founding member of the Emirati avant-garde of the 1980s and ’90s and as one of the young nation’s pioneering contemporary artists.

“Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia,” Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates, 60th Venice Biennale, 2024

For the past 40 years, Al Saadi has frequently embarked on journeys into the wilderness – on foot, by bike, with his Jeep, in the company of his dog or ​​​​donkey – traversing the rugged mountains and desertscapes surrounding his birthplace and home of Khor Fakkan, a small town on the eastern coast of the UAE. A “wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, memory carrier, and storyteller,” [2] Al Saadi creates hand-drawn records of his journeys, collects and catalogues found objects, and creates representations of the natural environments he subjects himself to. Eight of the artist’s journeys (undertaken between 2011 and 2023) form the basis for his solo presentation at the Sale d’Armi in the Arsenale, where the National Pavilion UAE has had its permanent space since 2013 (the UAE became the first Gulf state to participate in the Venice Biennale in 2009). Designed to reflect upon the winding routes Al Saadi takes during his excursions – the snaking road is a recurring motif in the works on view – waist-high steel-and-glass shelves lead the visitors along a curving path through the exhibition space. Delicately rendered maps, notations, diary entries, and poems, engraved or painted on rocks or canvas scrolls, are positioned on the shelves as well as ​​the adjacent wall spaces to recount Al Saadi’s treks, evoking a sense of cartographic study while maintaining a perspective that is both constructed and subjective.

Maps of varying scale, as the most immediately accessible works in the exhibition to those who do not read Arabic, collapse an apparent bird’s-eye view perspective with elements dotted along their network of roads, outlined in a playfully simplistic manner: hotels, schools, mosques, highways, tunnels, ​​​​cars​,​ ​ ​​or ​bicycles coexist with palm trees, shrubs, birds​,​ ​or​​ ​ donkeys. Albeit far removed from the context of the megacities of Dubai or Abu Dhabi, these representations of a contemporary Emirati landscape refrain from mythologizing a remote or even untouched nature. Writing and painting with graphite, acrylic or oil paint on canvas during his trips, the artist then either cuts the individual canvas pieces to size and places them in used confectionery tin containers or rolls them up, storing the scrolls in ​​​​small, decorative metal boxes. The majority of the vast number of canvasses and objects produced during these outings – for instance, during The Slipper’s Journey (2014/15), Al Saadi painted roadmaps on 85 small flat stones, while A Journey in the Footsteps of Camar Cande (2017) resulted in 164 drawings – indeed remain enclosed in their metal containers. Meticulously catalogued, classified, and dated, they form an ongoing archive stored in larger metal chests. Intended to evoke a sense of entering the artist’s studio, toward the back of the exhibition space, a selection of these hidden artworks is revealed by performers who interact with the audience, opening chests and boxes placed in a large storage shelf on request and giving insights into the artist’s encounters, his written classification systems, invented alphabets, or quoting from poetry he read along the way. While the aspect of partial revelation, obscureness, and illegibility is indeed a most intriguing element of Al Saadi’s work, the gesture of reenactment and the curatorial approach toward performatively framing the artist as its protagonist renders the encounter with the work into a gimmicky experience here: instead of fostering a speculative engagement on the viewers’ part with the artworks and their creation process, the theatricality of their “explanation” makes the experience feel more like a contrived spectacle than an authentic exploration of the subtlety and the reclusiveness of the artist in his own world.

Abdullah Al Saadi, “The Slippers Journey” (Rock 24), 2014-15

This observation points to an ongoing challenge that conceptual art has posed ever since it emerged as an art movement in the 1960s: following the assertion, which Sol LeWitt laid out in his seminal “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” in 1967 (the year Al Saadi was born), that “in conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work,” [3] the question lingers whether the art object itself can then obtain a status beyond mere documentation or decoration of said idea. Mark Rappolt once commented on Simon Starling’s Turner Prize–winning work Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2) (2005) – a shed that Starling had come across during a bike ride along the Rhine, disassembled, reassembled as a boat, rowed to a museum in Basel, then reassembled as a shed, and exhibited – ​​“you might argue that this is a better story than it is a shed.” [4] Similarly, Al Saadi’s physical works may be read only as a fragment of his oeuvre; the acts of endurance, the solitary excursions, and the experiences of (interspecies) companionship that his journeys reflect sit at its​​​​ more compelling​ ​ core. The accompanying exhibition catalogue succeeds at situating the artist’s practice within this context, most intriguingly via a selection of photographs from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which, remaining absent from the exhibition, serve to illustrate excerpts from the artist’s diaries in the publication: showing Al Saadi and his bike, his tent, and other camping gear against the backdrop of stunning landscapes, the photographs challenge preconceived notions of what contemporaneity in the Gulf state may look like, defying and collapsing both the clichéd aesthetics of a recent past of Bedouin heritage and the shiny surfaces of a hypermodern era.

The catalogue expands on a narrative that frames Al Saadi as part of a generation of Emirati artists whose practices embody such a hybrid sense of identity. The ​​“Group of Five,” a constellation of conceptual artists formed in the ​​​​1980s that included the internationally acclaimed Hassan Sharif (1951–2016) ​​​​​​as well as Hussain Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, and Abdullah Al Saadi, were pivotal in introducing ensuing generations of Emirati artists to conceptual and Fluxus practices. Notably, decades later, they are consistently put forward as the UAE’s choice of national representation at the Venice Biennale – members of the all-male group have appeared in group or solo presentations in five of the eight editions the UAE has participated in since 2009. [5] When it comes to the Gulf states’ participation in international cultural events (from biennials to the football World Cup), Western perspectives and media tend to highlight their instrumentalization of contemporary culture as a resource of ​​​​soft power, while in fact, nation-building and -branding objectives have been pivotal to the very idea of the Venice Biennale’s founding, as a cultural platform which continues to notoriously consolidate the ​​​​nation-state as its organizing unit. While many of the participating nations nowadays grapple with deconstructing their foundational narratives, whether through decolonial efforts of “unlearning” or through acts of wilful amnesia, the UAE, in light of its relatively recent foundation in 1971, appears busy with constructing such a narrative to begin with.

Abdullah Al Saadi, “A Journey on the Footsteps of Camar Cande by Car” (Box 26), 2017

Against the backdrop of the Arab Gulf region often being painted as a kind of ​​​​tabula rasa devoid of history, as if skyscrapers and highways appeared overnight and cultural output only came into being with the formation of the nation-state, [6] Dubai-based critic Rahel Aima has astutely pointed out how the portrayal of the “Five” has been integral to the UAE’s construction of a narrative akin to a “hagiography.” In fact, the group of artists had toiled away in relative obscurity until the early 2000s, “when the country’s cultural ambitions necessitated an art-historical origin story.” [7] In evoking a sense of a performed retrospective that elevates the artist to mythic proportions, the UAE pavilion’s portrayal of Abdullah Al Saadi seems to serve such a strategy of filling perceived historical voids to shape collective memory as part of an ongoing national project. However, at its most captivating, conceptual core, Al Saadi’s practice can tell a cohesive story in its own right: outlining the details and observations of his travels in sober yet profound terms, especially the excerpts from his diaries reveal a palpable and authentic, sensory, and spiritual connection to a place whose narratives predate and transcend the oil boom, the subsequent ​​​​transformations, and the ongoing construction of a national identity. You might argue that this is the better story.

“Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia,” Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates at the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April - 24 November 2024

Linnéa Bake is a curator and writer based in Berlin. She is one of the cofounders and artistic directors of the non-profit art space soft power.

Image credits: 1.-2. Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE La Biennale di Venezia, Photo by Ismail Noor/Seeing Things; 3.-4. courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE La Biennale di Venezia, Photo by Roman Mensing