Green Art gallery is pleased to present a solo booth for Emirati artist Asma Belhamar for her debut at Art Basel Paris. Belhamar’s interdisciplinary practice explores the phenomenon of the megastructure in the UAE, and the wider Gulf in general, and its impact on the topographical memory of local landscapes. Through installation, sculptures and drawing, she synthesises the architectural and the organic to construct hybrid spaces that engage with notions of temporality and spatial memory. Her practice is driven by a desire to illustrate the effect that various architectural trends have had on perceptions of the region both locally and globally.

For the Emergence section, Belhamar’s project includes drawings and assemblies of stoneware clay, wood, and ceramic tiles. Further expanding her visual and material vocabulary, the artist continues her exploration of architectural elements as bearers of the past and projections into the future, carrying both aspirations and contradictions tied to futurity and nostalgia, inspiration and preservation, acceleration and repose.

Belhamar fuses fragments of local examples of ornamentation, which she documents on her evening walks, with existing generic forms extracted from both the urban environment (such as walls, curbs, and playground slides) and the domestic environment (for example, stairwells and seating). Her focus remains fixed firmly on architecture in its physical and psychological forms. The drawings presented are extensions of Belhamar’s ongoing exploration into how architecture in the UAE is experienced, as though viewed from a moving vehicle. Like the balustrades that she has come to be known for, which appear to stretch or melt, her drawings play with the idea of double-takes, whether due to the optical effect of speed or the distorted residue of a memory. Reminiscent of glitching cameras, dreamy flashbacks, or the drive-by glimpse of a scene, the drawings hone in on corners, freezing the movement of shadows or capturing the layered grid structures of the city. Created on primed canvas using acrylic, the drawings feature a color palette that echoes the sun-soaked walls of government-granted plots demarcated by UAE citizens under land grant schemes, as well as the sepia tones of old family albums. 

For this project, Belhamar uses a technique that merges the affordances of technological advancement with the handmade. The ceramic elements within her spatial assemblies are 3D printed. Far from the smooth, hassle-free process one may imagine, this is an intensive approach to making. The artist must first create an inner architecture for structural integrity, for which she appropriates ornamental forms, before processes of wedging, printing, attaching, drying, firing, glazing, and re-firing can take place. These pieces are then married with other forms in wood, the result of which represents neither architecture nor furniture. While the pieces take inspiration from existing elements, they are skewed in scale. Some pieces are placed on unused tiles from the artist’s home, while others are carefully nestled within supportive frames, encouraging the viewer to contort to their own logic.

In his 1971 text “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger states, “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell.” Belhamar’s proposal is infused throughout the project and can be taken to function as a wider metaphor for the building practices of the UAE at large, as far as they can be interpreted on a domestic and regional scale. It offers an invitation to ruminate on the nostalgia of the modern, the efficiency of the technological, as well as the creative challenge of the empty lot. If dwelling is a question of how to live, then it is indelibly tied to the question of how and what we build in order to live. Belhamar’s work proposes that dreams are constructed from both the future and the past.

The presentation is kindly supported by the UAE Ministry of Culture, as part of the National Grant Program for Culture and Creativity that includes a set of grants to offer support to UAE national creatives. Aimed at fostering talent and overall cultural production, the grants target creative professionals distinguished in the cultural and creative industries.