DUBAI: A lone determine wearing black sits cross-legged on the desert sands whereas dealing with a makeshift fishing hut, as dozens of birds fly over. The situation is the island of Jubabibat — considered one of many who make up Abu Dhabi’s expansive but little identified archipelago — the person is artist and trainer Tarek Al-Ghoussein, who died unexpectedly in New York on June 11 on the age of 60.
The information was introduced on Sunday by Al-Ghoussein’s consultant gallery, Dubai-based The Third Line.
“It’s with a heavy coronary heart that we announce the sudden passing of Tarek Al-Ghoussein yesterday in New York Metropolis,” learn the assertion, posted to Instagram.
It’s maybe becoming to recollect the artist by means of the poignant {photograph} from his collection “Odysseus,” which Al-Ghoussein had been taking pictures since 2015 to capturing the archipelago on this considerably unexplored a part of the Arabian Gulf.
The picture, which reveals the artist in an nearly meditative pose, provides a way of the peace and calm {that a} second in a desolate a part of the Arabian Gulf can carry, a uncommon expertise amid years of fixed development. Al-Ghoussein typically contains himself within the pictures, thus involving self-portraiture and a performative facet to the works.
So far, he had documented over 40 of the 214 islands within the archipelago, with a number of of the works occurring present on the Louvre Abu Dhabi as a part of the Richard Mille Artwork Prize exhibition. The works, like others he l produced through the years all through the UAE and larger Gulf, mix elements of documentary images and photojournalism in addition to efficiency and self-portraiture, as Al-Ghoussein would typically attest himself.
The Kuwaiti artist and educator was a professor of visible arts at New York College in Abu Dhabi, and had lately turn into the director of the MFA in artwork and media program on the college.
Pals, colleagues and college students have taken to social media over the past 48 hours to commemorate his life and ship condolences.
“We’re in shock about this terrible information,” learn an announcement issued by NYU Abu Dhabi on Twitter.
Born in Kuwait to Palestinian exiles, Al-Ghoussein grew up between the US, Japan and Morocco, touring ceaselessly along with his diplomat father. He obtained his BFA in images from New York College in 1985 and his MA in images from the College of Mexico in 1989. Al-Ghoussein started working as a photojournalist documenting refugee camps in Jordan, but a want to transcend the bounds of images and seize the emotional and psychological struggles of being a refugee led him to enterprise into the realm of conceptual images.
Concepts of exile, displacement and battle persist inside Al-Ghoussein’s work — nods to his family’s state as Palestinians in Kuwait, pressured to go away their house and begin anew elsewhere.
As curator Jack Persekian wrote so eloquently in Bidoun in 2005, “Even he wouldn’t deny the next: His composite background, his lack of direct familiarity with Palestine itself, is on the coronary heart of the artist’s work.”
His first collection of works titled “Efficiency Pictures” have been self-portraits exhibited within the 2003 Sharjah Biennale as lightboxes. They later have been displayed in group exhibitions within the US and Europe. Those self same pictures have been attacked, says Persekian, throughout a solo present in Berlin, with stones thrown in order that the glass they have been encased in shattered. The incident added to Al-Ghoussein’s personal explorations into Palestinian and Arab id, recollections of house and the notion of Arabs who’ve been displaced.
A piece that powerfully captures Al-Ghoussein’s quest to doc and protect websites on the verge of demolition and loss is Al-Sawaber (2015-17), shot in a former authorities housing venture in Kuwait Metropolis. Demolition of the 33 buildings had been deliberate and over the span of three years Al-Ghoussein continued to return to it, documenting every of its 524 flats. It was a spot, he mentioned, the place Kuwaitis lived amidst communities of various Muslims, Christians and Hindus. The images seize not simply the buildings, however the objects the previous inhabitants left behind.
His work is now within the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Royal Museum of Pictures in Copenhagen, Mathaf Museum, Barjeel Artwork Basis, Sharjah Artwork Basis, Mori Artwork Museum, the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Basis, and the New York College Abu Dhabi, amongst others.
