My friend Sarah Daher – a Master’s student in Curating Contemporary Art – is having breakfast with me in Dubai, talking about the exhibition she has curated in the space we are sitting in. “It’s about the female body, about muses,” she says. I have offered a few of my poems for her exhibition booklet, poems in which I had attempted to breathe life into my own self as a woman. Poems in which I had tried to put myself back into my own hands.

Daher’s exhibition is titled, “This lark sips at every pond: women as artist and muse”. It is currently on show at maisan15, a cafe-gallery near Knowledge Park, Dubai, and features six female artists, including painters, photographers, poets, and musicians. The wall text considers how women have been reduced to nothing but “fountains of inspiration,” asking “What does the muse become when it is diffracted through the eye of a female artist? Where can inspiration dwell? And how can it be tapped?”

I am struck by the use of the word “it” in relation to the muse, that the muse is approached, even in the semantics of grammar, as an object. The muse as a concept is distinctly feminized and associated with women. I wonder, does putting on an all female show, of both curators and creators, effectively do enough to put the concept of a muse – incomplete, romanticized, not nearly complicated enough – into question?

When I was a teenager in high school, I became somewhat obsessed with researching muses and their contemporary version, the manic pixie dream girl. Sitting here now, I trace a lot of what has happened to me in my relationships through this early immersion in muse-tastic media and literature. I absorbed these women written into history by men. I absorbed Sam’s quirks in Garden State, and Yoko Ono’s coolness, later vilified for “ensnaring” John Lennon. I absorbed and subconsciously began to emulate these women who had supposedly bewitched men into transforming their lives, and were then left in the dust of a nasty plot device. Plots that were erasures, violences, and endings, thwarted a representation that was truly fair to them. These women were interesting to me and were made interesting through how they were presented, as muses with near-mythical status. Their suffering didn't register for me; it was only their romanticization in relation to the men around them.

I have always loved literature, art, and history for their power in complicating and enriching the narratives of how we exist in the world. As I grew older, and found myself in the dust, I was faced with this fact: that I had grown up writing myself into male oriented stories thinking it would grant me happiness and success as a woman. Men wrote me into their poems. Men told me how much I had inspired them. That I was their savior. I lapped it up for the most part, thinking I was such a fantastic muse – fantastic woman. I became so many women for the men in my life that in the end, I had no idea who I was nor whose story I was in.

After my senior year breakup, my ex told me: “You saved my life.” When he left, I held my legs to my chest – a bare-boned bird in a fetal position, with her wings torn up. I wondered, what about my life? Who was in whose narrative? Who had been saved, and who had been utterly destroyed?

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maisan15 is a very small space. It is primarily a cafe with a cozy outdoor seating area, yet with very limited wall space. There is a long bookcase in the indoor space, a row of dining booths, and a large open-air counter which houses the kitchen area. Any artworks put up here must adapt themselves to the cafe’s confines. Artworks are hung by the narrow stairwell down into the indoor space, between the booths, and often above the corner coffee machine or the TV screen above the kitchen. In this case, the poetry – written by Chilean artist Cristalina Parra – was displayed on A5 notepaper tacked to the glass partitions between booths, slipped into the menu, and written onto the mirror to the far left by the door, which admittedly could be easily missed or even vandalized – which they were, unfortunately. The size and business aspect of maisan15 pose a challenge to curators towards highlighting artworks amid a tiny, bustling cafe area.

It can become easy then to be critical of the organization of an exhibition in such a constrained space. I admire the effort of it, as it is difficult to work with such a small space while trying to do the artworks full justice. In the “surf shack” feel of maisan15, as described by Daher herself, I admit that I don’t miss the spotless imposed aesthetics of traditional white-walled galleries, so full of emptiness and silence and “airs.” In a way, there’s something refreshing about having people eating and leafing through books and talking about their lives around you among the art. It allows the art to seep into a more experiential mode, where it exists amid all the quotidian moments of life, like paying a bill or ordering eggs.

Being a poet, I think about the metaphors of how this exhibition is presented. It involves displaying female artists and tackling the muse in such a constrained space, much of the same way in which muses or women and female artists in general are boxed in and crammed into corners. Do I think this specific exhibition perpetuates this claustrophobia or uses it intentionally? There is indeed a formal distinction that can be made between the limits of the space and its metaphorical resonance, a tension ignited between the limits placed on “muses” and the exhibition's attempt to “open” these topics up for conversation. It may be that this was simply the space available to Daher. Regardless, imagining a potentially symbiotic relationship between exhibition space and artworks feels thrilling – especially in the context of this show. As an alternative exhibition space, maisan15 is also a container for the nascent grassroots art community in the UAE, challenging the formal relationships and rules under which exhibitions can emerge here. The constraints of this space can challenge curators, as Daher has shown, to work with their formal and spatial parameters in interesting ways in tandem to their curatorial concepts and narratives.

What I lament however is that the artworks in this show do not always clearly evoke the curatorial narrative that is presented through the wall text’s statement. Almost no exhibition exists without text, and in this one, the wall text is the first thing one encounters in their journey through the show. While its early placement helps guide the viewer in the framing of the works, the connections between concept, text, and works are still not immediately obvious – unless you’re lucky enough to be Daher’s friend and she gives you a personalized tour after you’ve finished eating your delightful, cheese-filled “Croque Maisan.”

Lacing through each of the works on display, Daher showcases the two portraits by Amina Yehia – an Egyptian artist based in Abu Dhabi – who has painted her sister and also herself. The works, gorgeous, realistic and technically impressive, are placed facing each other on opposite walls, a neat curatorial decision that allows them to become dialectical, and look at each other in their private lens world. Elsewhere are paintings and a trippy multimedia piece by Aliyah Al Awadhi, whose female-centring paintings I enjoy most, for their rich and joyful colors that still maintain tight narrative focus. One of these paintings is among the first pieces you encounter in the space, and seems to have the most direct connection to the exhibition’s concept: a woman lounges on her sofa while a man’s head is placed on the floor in front of her. The destructiveness of the muse in art history – where men have long painted women languishing in pain, or with no regard to their interiority – seems to be literally turned on its head.

Between the booths, Daher has chosen to alternate between framed photographs by the infamous portrait photographer Marta Lamovsek, and by Bahrain-UAE based artist Mashael Alsaie. Lamovsek’s portraits are vividly colored and styled – and interestingly, are of men. At first, I was bothered by this. Why portraits of men in this constructed “female” space about muses? Yet, upon further thought, it works. Here is a woman making a man her muse, directing them and dressing them according to a story she has interpreted of the subject. In Daher’s explanation of the photos, she explains how the men in the pictures felt the very essence of them had been captured in their photos, however stylized they were. I left thinking that this again turned the traditional narrative of muses on its head. A female artist portraying her male muse with respect and complexity given to their story and self is something that has rarely been seen in men’s depictions of women throughout time.

Alsaie’s photographs, meanwhile, are the least obvious additions to the exhibition. Initially appearing as ordinary urban landscape scenes, Daher explains that “the large puddles of water in the images are allusions to the myth of Adhari, where a virginal woman cries a multitude of magical tears that turn into an ever flowing spring, after turning down a man’s proposal which consequently makes her suffer.” The reference to myths in an exhibition on the muse is fitting and effectively adds an important historical node to the overall concept. However, its full meaning and impact remains lacking to the casual viewer due to the absence of framing label text. A complex dilemma arises: due to the sensitive subject matter of the myth, the explanatory label is eschewed. Thus, an important connection that would illuminate the viewer’s understanding of the works is simultaneously lost. A curatorial opportunity cost is exacted, and I wonder if it is one borne proportionally more by female curators and artists. In the bid for self- and community protection, sensitive decisions must be made when discussing violences against women, even and especially in creative and discursive academic spaces. While it is a question warranting a separate discussion, one could consider the ways in which holding back may hold us back too, and what is gained and what is lost, and what is worth pursuing?

In nooks elsewhere, Cristalina Parra’s poems imagine the city as a muse, making references to Al Nakheel and metro stations, a thematic concept I myself like to explore in poetry, considering the long held feminization of countries, cities, and land in general, both in academia and literature. The poems are small, tender and lyrical, like little unfurled napkins. They are also notably bilingual, interweaving both Spanish and English, a decision I appreciated as a nod to both the multifaceted existence and thought processes of women in the way they express themselves, as well as the multilingualism of the UAE itself. But overall, I was left wanting more. I wished there was more verse, that the poems were larger and more visible. I wish they conversed more with the artworks. What would happen if the poems were placed directly next to an artwork? In the distinct sense of voice that poetry offers, would other works on display have begun new conversations with the poems or gained voices themselves? Would the whole exhibition have gained a new dimension of dialectics?

Finally, there was music. A Spotify playlist by New York based singer and songwriter Juletta played overhead, incorporating her music, and interviews she had conducted with various women throughout New York City. Music provides such wonderful ambience to a space like maisan15 but there was unfortunately no indicator present to describe the significance of what was playing or Juletta’s creation. Here is where potential interactions between the poetry and music could have been attempted, amplifying the crucial voice of both these forms. What audio or even video equipment might have been used to support this? Unfortunately in the end, I couldn’t catch much of Juletta’s work at all. Here is where the constraints of this specific space rear their head again: how can the music playing in a cafe be emphasized as part of the exhibition context to a casual visitor there for breakfast?

Criticisms aside, I must imagine myself in Daher’s position, and consider what I would have done myself. It is already commendable to me that so much was achieved in such a small space and through personal networking on the curator’s behalf. A variety of mediums, forms, narratives, and references were on display. Lately, after reading Postscript’s own conversation with photographer Sohrab Hura – who recently made his curatorial debut in Dubai – I have been rethinking how exhibitions should be approached and evaluated. The norm has been to offer criticism on exhibitions as finished products, as endings, both as curatorial productions and as completed works from an artist’s oeuvre. But Hura mentions seeing his own exhibition Growing Like A Tree, as a passing point, for both himself and for the artists on display. The paths of curatorial production and of making art are long meandering journeys in flux, in which concepts, materials, and ideas are both gained and discarded as time goes on.

In short, there is no ending. An exhibition is not an ending, not a period point to a certain narrative. The way a woman presents herself, through art, curation, or any other avenue, is not an endpoint. Her narrative, as a muse or subverter of the muse, is also its own journey in flux. “This lark sips at every pond” is instead an opening. Six female artists, a curious female curator, and a small space are enough to flute outwards into larger conversations about female representation in art, especially in less established and more grassroots spaces. This show is not an ending for any of its women nor its viewers, but an opening, into a moment of time and state of their creative practice, and the many paths they may continue to go on from here. Theirs is not an ending, but a door blown ajar.

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