Desert Cast: Towards an Identity
A drive over an ornate — and incredibly crowded — bridge brought me to an odd underpass/roundabout hybrid. To the right, through the underpass, was a children’s amusement park. To the left, the tallest flagpole I’ve ever seen, and considering the 10 years I’ve spent in the UAE, a country very fond of large flagpoles, that is saying something. Under the flagpole, my destination. A stout stone, glass, and metal structure, with curved walls and Arabic calligraphy engraved into its walls: this is 1971-Design Space.
Located on The Flag Island in Sharjah, the 1971-Design Space opened in 2015, serving as one of the emirate’s many non-profit design galleries. A multi-functional design space, it specializes in the exhibition, display, and discussion of contemporary design, ranging from graphic, furniture, interior, and interactive design. 1971 emphasizes collaboration with local and regional artists, architects, and educational institutions, hoping to form a comprehensive program of curated exhibitions and public programs.
Its latest exhibition, “Desert Cast: Towards an Identity,” showcases the work of three Kuwait-based designers: Jassim Al Nashimi, Kawther Al Saffar, and Ricardas Blazukas. The trio, in collaboration with UAE-based designer Talin Hazbar, work to explore how to build a local design identity in the context of a nation that is at once nascent and discovering itself, while also already being overdetermined by external – often Western – opinions. As its subject, the exhibition examines gypsum cornices and friezes, architectural elements with their roots in Greco-Roman architecture. The cornice refers to the overhanging strip often found at the top of walls – initially intended to redirect rainwater. Friezes are long narrow sculptural bands used for decorative purposes. Both features are a common motif on homes in Kuwait and around the Gulf, a borrowed decorative detail intended to replicate the grandeur and luxury of Classical architecture. Gypsum, contrastingly, is a cheap and easily manufactured material, that accommodates for the demand of rapid construction in the expanding Gulf states, despite its lack of durability. “Desert Cast” recontextualizes the ubiquitous curves and angles of the cornices and the cost-effectiveness of gypsum, exploring how the imported design aesthetic creates “a disingenuous sense of vicarious and exotic luxury”, which the artists attribute to an orientalist attitude towards the Middle East. By repeating and abstracting the familiar shapes, created using more traditional techniques, the exhibition hopes to discover a more authentic local design identity, one that is rooted in the rich history of the region.
The outer glass double doors of the 1971 Design Space helpfully include the name and blurb of the current exhibition. However, stepping through brings visitors directly into the charming yet generic space of Jones The Grocer – a popular Australian grocery store/cafe/cheese shop hybrid. Visitors encounter the familiar scent of brewing coffee and an array of carefully curated imported foods. Entering an exhibition about the specificities of the architecture in the Gulf, in such a non-specific architectural space — a café chain — was ironic, to say the least. I’m used to ending trips to galleries at a café – taking the opportunity to rest my tired feet and reflect on the works I’d seen – not beginning them.
The actual gallery space is tucked away up a flight of concrete stairs in a corner to the left of the entrance. At the center of the exhibit is a large-scale sculpture of painted wood shaped to match the curved and angular decorative motifs, upon which smaller sculptures are displayed. The wood serves as platforms for different iterations of the Desert Cast project, including metal stools first displayed at Dubai Design Week and more recent aluminum sculptures that reinterpret 2D gypsum profiles. The exhibit’s exploration is rooted in material and fabrication. The metal stools are a project to combine the traditional Kuwaiti production methods of gypsum-molding and sand-casting through foam. The gypsum profiles were first cut in foam and then used to cast the complete metal stools. Resulting in structures that are alternatively too curved or too angular to be entirely functional, but whose form and fabrication reflect a rich history.
The material history is further explored in the accompanying multimedia pieces found deeper in the space. Stepping past the sculptural centerpiece, the noises of fabrication start to fill the air, an accompanying video projected onto the back wall shows shots of craft materials. The sound is unobtrusive and largely indecipherable; initially, I mistook it for static or a malfunctioning air conditioning vent. Only after surveying the video did I start to pick out particular sounds of hammering, sanding, tools colliding, coughing, and the sizzle of water being poured over hot metal. The projection splits its field of view into three, each showing a different closeup of the elements of the fabrication work, drawing the viewer’s attention to an abstraction of shapes and labour. At once, you might catch glimpses of water being poured on one side, sand being mixed by disembodied hands in the center, and thin loops of metal being melted down in flashes of fire on the other end. The effect is at once confusing and mesmerizing; I watched the entire three minute loop twice, trying to pick out each distinct component of the construction process being examined.
This is the only space in the gallery where I saw people, other than the security guard checking my temperature at the door, I was alone. Though these videos are abstracted, the noise of human voices and human activity hold a welcome familiarity from my years of living around the omnipresent construction sites of the Gulf, helping to center my experience of the show. The human presence in the video and audio - though partial - was to me, the most powerful element in conveying the artist’s intention of reconnecting not only with the objects and their history but with the people who constructed that history.
The final piece at the very back of the space is a simple workbench, with plaster residue and dust surrounding the area. Like the videos, the workbench speaks towards the human labour that created the shapes on display; atop the bench are abandoned tools, half-finished moulds, and a distinct mess that comes along with crafting. The bench’s position in the gallery - tucked away in the back nook, concealed behind the main sculpture until one fully enters the space and walks to the back - gives the impression that it was perhaps just in use, and the workers have only left it briefly to take a break.
One detail that particularly caught my eye was the cardboard and plywood mold being used to cast a plaster cornice. The mold resembles a box with the bottom edges serrated to form the profile of the plaster, and is covered in paint and plaster residue. The presence of the mold once again helps concretize the process of creating the artwork, drawing attention to the specific tools and mechanisms used to create cornices and friezes. The mold, and the bench, more broadly, give direct meaning back to the abstraction of shapes seen in the gallery thus far, creating a sense of the process and labour required to form the cornices. This impression, however, is undermined by the fact that it appeared to me that the paint splatter on the bench (particularly on the legs) was artificially placed, to construct an impression of the bench being used, rather than a genuine outcome of wear and tear.
The mold, however, helped to contextualize an earlier piece in the gallery, a collage on the wall which I recognized as being made of fragments from old, used molds only after seeing the work bench. The collage cleverly took on new contextual meaning as I moved back towards the space of the gallery, becoming less of a simple abstraction of the curving edges of the cornices, and into a deliberate repurposing of living/used crafting objects into a work of art. The plywood of the collage molds is visibly worn, with dented metal reinforcements, stained with white plaster, and frayed edge, marking them as pieces that were evidently used to create the sculptures rather than being artificially created solely for exhibit, making it the more successful piece.
Overall, the exhibition has a whimsy and playfulness in the deliberate abstraction and repetition of motifs, reclaiming and repurposing a shape that is ubiquitous to the region almost for all the wrong reasons, building an alternate architecture directly out of little more than a decorative motif. The exploration of fabrication, the combining of foam, sand-casting, and metalworking, re-figures and re-assigns meaning to make the imported ideals of luxury feel deliberately local, and more directly referencing and collaborating with local craft tradition. That said, some parts of the show are more successful than others, namely the ones that engage directly with the labour required to produce architecture as opposed to presenting finished or polished “art”.
The artists express a desire to elevate and appreciate the workmanship of local craftsmen, and the exhibition publication aims to document the fabrication processes, but I wonder if the positioning of the work within a gallery space undermines that precise goal - sanitizing and erasing the labour behind the work, in favour of an elusive artistic value that feels required or imposed by the white walls, high ceilings, and bright lights of a gallery. Without the context of the fabrication and material history - provided by external explanations I found afterwards, rather than the works directly - the exhibition left me with an architectural spectacle, a new appreciation and attention to the specific profiles to look for in the architecture around me, but one that continued to feel distanced from the hands that made it.