Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia

Abdullah Al Saadi (b. 1967) is the representative of the United Arab Emirates at this year’s Venice Biennale. His exhibition, Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia was curated by Tarek Abou El Fetouh, director of performance and senior curator at the Sharjah Art Foundation. Although a pioneering Emirati artist highly regarded in the UAE and the Middle East with an international profile, Al Saadi is not well-known in the west. He has that in common with many of the participants in the biennale’s 60^th edition. Aptly titled “Foreigners Everywhere - Stranieri Ovunque,” its artistic director, Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, has introduced (to his great credit, if also mixed reviews) an unprecedented number of new artists and countries to the art world’s highest echelons. His decision is acknowledgment of current geopolitics and socioeconomic trends, making this so-called international showcase more truly so, as Global South meets Global North, and East and West recommence their ongoing dalliance. Integral to that is the recognition that artists have become increasingly peripatetic. However, even as inclusion is embraced, increasing restrictions means that more international borders are now blocked or nearly so.

The heart of Al Saadi’s practice parallels the theme of the biennale. Focusing on journeys, the exhibition features eight of his multidisciplinary works from the past decade. If that sounds spare, each work is prodigiously expansive and might consist of hundreds of paintings, drawings, found objects, photographs, notebooks, and videos—the residuum of a particular journey that is divided into the experience of it, which is ephemeral, and the chronicling, the ensnaring of that experience into the visible and tangible. His travels are episodic, in the tradition of the picaresque and of pilgrimages, as he treks through the eastern Arabian Peninsula where he lives and works, going by foot, bicycle, and sometimes car, his artwork and writings later organized, categorized, annotated, and destined to be deposited in gaudily appealing painted-metal chests.

The pavilion’s installation is a kind of three-dimensional version of his mappings. Thin tubes of overhead lighting suggest wending pathways or ravines. The curves of the terrain are repeated in the serpentine turnings of the multilevel glass tables that display painted and inscribed rocks and objects, drawings, and notes nestled into cookie tins. In turn, their twists are echoed in the floor design that links the tables together. On the walls are works that include paintings and drawings from his Gramophone Journey by Bicycle (2023). There are two iterations of it here that correspond with his most recent trips in which he strapped an antique gramophone to his bicycle and brought it along with records and rolls of canvas. Although they are usually revealed a section at a time, the paintings are unfurled for the exhibition, suggesting the hanging scrolls of Asian art (he had studied in Kyoto) as well as Bedouin wall hangings. His style, however, is figurative, that of folk art and the artisanal, charming in its directness and immediacy, buoyed by the freshness of color, his depictions seasoned by the comical.

Al Saadi’s tone is low-keyed, wry, and while humor is arguably the most difficult to convey across cultures, there are universals. One of his often referred to trips is a journey with his donkey and dog, first taken in 2011 and reprised several times. Three iterations are shown here. Cumar Cande, the name of his donkey, is significant, translated as “White Sugar” and sounds like “Samarkand,” conjuring the fabled city along the Silk Road as well as the venerable literary genre of the (anti-heroic) picaresque. One quick graphite sketch depicts Cumar Cande by a triangle and two elongated ovals, all ears, which made me smile. Al Saadi likes to travel with companions, but what he considers companions can be eccentric and might include stones, as in the Al-Toubay Journey (2013). Delicately, beautifully inscribed with images of a dog, donkey, goat, ibex, and other animals that the artist conversed with, recording those speculative discussions into his notebooks and diaries.

In the back of the pavilion shelves are stacked with the brightly colored metal chests that serve as the artist’s archives. They are portable, like suitcases, underscoring the ancient culture of nomadism that was still prevalent when Al Saadi came of age. Viewers are invited to choose a particular chest, its contents then explained by a staff member, duplicating what happens when visiting the artist’s studio.

Al Saadi acts as an archivist, taxonomer, archaeologist, anthropologist, collector, visual artist, performer, poet, philosopher, humorist, a kind of cryptographer (he invents alternative alphabets) and more. His fragments of transient narratives of a time and place, although traces, cumulatively add up to create something like an epic for today.