In this quiet, residential enclave of Al Quoz, there is nothing to distinguish The Flying House from any of the other buildings on the street. There's no sign, no flag, no symbol. But in the garden of number 18, a tree is wrapped in ribbon, piles of rocks bound with wire are entombed beneath glass and dozens of tin cans have faces punched in them. Inside, a whole room has been devoted to bent pieces of cardboard, glued together, tied up and bundled onto shelves. Spoons are twisted around metal and a clear glass door has been stuffed with wool. There are unidentified sculptures, pieces of scratched perspex and photographs of bare arms and legs on the walls.
And that's just the ground floor. Upstairs are dozens of colourful canvases, a studio and a roof terrace stacked full of metal storage boxes. Opened in December last year, The Flying House is not an art gallery or museum (it does not have permission to accept members of the public except by prior appointment); lack of space means that presentation is not its strong point. It is, instead, a permanent exhibition space for contemporary Emirati art, collected over more than 30 years by Abdulraheem Sharif, brother of Hassan and Hussain Sharif, the former the country's best-known artist to date.
The Flying House is a non-profit organisation, selling art only to meet its running costs and assist its 10-strong group of artists. It only sells major works to museums, yet still its collection of 2,500 works has an estimated value of Dh150 million ($40 million). Barely a third of what has been collected is on show, but that will change in October, when Sharif and his collective open a nearby warehouse. Abdulraheem, a former trading company owner who built the house in 1979, has also incurred expenses of over Dh1.7 million ($460,000). It has been a struggle to get to this point. Hassan Sharif, now 57, lives in the property along with Mohammed Kazem, 39, a Dubai-born artist and the co-curator of the Sharjah Biennial, and Jos Clevers, 56, The Flying House's Dutch curator. The three sleep on foam matresses in makeshift studios dotted all over the ground floor. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) the chaos, it's refreshing to be somewhere where art isn't presented in the sanitised environment of a fake souq or shopping centre.
"It's more of a laboratory than an exhibition space," admits Clevers. "We just wanted to give an insight into the contemporary art movement here, and when we get the warehouse, we'll look at the quality of our exhibitions. We will make our own presentations, give workshops and create a meeting point." Abdulraheem blames the relative newness of the UAE as a country and the long-standing absence of an art curriculum in schools for the relative lack of contemporary art in the country to date, but says the problem now is more to do with a lack of venues than a lack of artists. He began collecting the work of his brothers and his contemporaries in the early 1970s, when Hassan was working as a newspaper cartoonist. "Then, in the 1980s, when Hassan returned from art school in London and started putting on exhibitions, everybody was saying that this was not art. The reaction towards his work was very negative and people did not understand it. But the more I sat and talked with these artists, the more I fell in love with it and realised that we had to start documenting all of this, because no one else was doing it."
Clevers, who arrived in Dubai in 1994, tells a similar story. "When I came here people said contemporary art did not exist in the UAE. I had trouble finding it. Basically it had all been happening at Hassan Sharif's house in Satwa, and until a year ago, this was the meeting point for journalists, poets, writers and artists. It was known as the House of Hassan." Abdulraheem decided to donate his family home to the cause of art, naming The Flying House after a painting by Clevers, the only non-Emirati work in the building. "We had to give it a strong name to really start visualising this movement," Clevers says. "Now groups are coming here from all over the world to find out who we are and what we are doing."
Abdulraheem, who now lives in a rented apartment, says he was forced into supporting modern art, particularly installation art, because of public hostility to his brother's work and that of his contemporaries. "Everybody was saying there was no contemporary art available in the UAE and that there are no contemporary artists. I was getting quite nervous because I had something like 10 containers of the work and people were telling me it didn't exist. I realised that somebody had to look after this work and that person just happened to be me."
He has had the last laugh, because since he started saving and documenting their work, Hassan, Mohammed Kazem and Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, who is based in the mountains of Khorfakkan, Sharjah, have gained international recognition, exhibiting and selling their work worldwide. Even the Guggenheim Foundation, which is opening a vast new museum in Abu Dhabi in 2012, has visited with a view to making some purchases. "World famous curators and consultants are now coming here, but the art is more important than the money", Clevers says. "The most important thing is that we have gained recognition for our movement. When the big museums open we want to see Emirati art in them and Emirati curators curating it. We don't want people from outside coming to tell us what it is."
Clevers is clearly enjoying the opportunity of countering what he calls the "neocolonialism" of the global art industry. "We have to show people from abroad that it's not possible for them to come here and show only their art, and then leave. We are emphasising that the UAE has its own artists who are not different to people from the rest of the world. They have their culture and their contemporary heritage, and it's not only in business and building high towers."
The business of Hassan Sharif is by turns versatile and prolific, eccentric and crude. Technically skilled, Sharif was obsessively studying Van Gogh, Picasso and Cezanne at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London (now part of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) when he read Tolstoy's What is Art? and began experimenting with the concept of the consumer society. Two decades after Warhol and other Western artists embraced the subject, Sharif began subverting the apparent senselessness with which throwaway objects are produced: "I collect things from daily life, and cancel the functions for which they were made for [by] beating, cutting, making holes in them or adding other materials to them... and I exhibit them as works of art."
In one of his rooms at the back of the house, Sharif is working on a collection of drawings called System and Semi System, which were started in 1983 and have continued in stages. Using black ink on white paper, he is currently drawing repetitive strokes frame by frame, each one slightly different from the last, in order to mimic the repetition of musical notes. "If you think about it, nothing is ever repeated exactly," Sharif says. "The passage of time makes everything different, so there is no such thing as total repetition." In another room a pile of "Made in China" plastic jugs are tied together. The ultimate aim, Sharif says, is "to destroy the continuous monotony of the industrial producer" - something which makes him virtually unique in Dubai. Sharif's work ethic and methodology, though, are clear. "I don't believe in inspiration," he says. "I don't have time for it. Each day, I make a decision to do something and I do it."
I enjoyed Sharif's large, abstract expressionist oil paintings, such as The Flying House, which transforms the dreary view of satellite dishes from the roof into a collection of colourful discs which seem to whirl into outer space. Yet one is forced to admire his truculent disdain for throwaway items, which he manages to make look even more like rubbish than they did before. Sharif's interest in cardboard, he says, "is to do with the fact that it has been used by others. The identity of these people is in the materials, but I don't know who they are. Out of something anonymous, I make something which is known." Still, at the 7th Sharjah Biennial in 2005, Sharif placed objects made of glued cardboard in front of the Art Museum, but they were taken away by street cleaners before the opening. His impenetrability has enraged and irritated some viewers, but Sharif has a deft, if unsatisfactory, rebuff to anybody who might complain. "Art is not made to be understood," he says, "it is not a train that carries you to a specific destination. We, the audience, have to get out and walk into new spaces."
Such pugnaciousness is also on display from Mohammed Kazem, who said in a recent documentary that his idea of "finding a relationship between my work and my environment" included attaching his paintings to his SUV and taking it for a drive. "I put my paintings on my car and I go to any place I like and I show it to the public in an open exhibition. I don't care if many people come or not." It is Kazem's bare arms and legs which are in the photographs on the ground floor, and they are accommpanied by other self-obsessed, somewhat Freudian images of the artist using his tongue to explore a keyhole, a kettle, a water hose, a bottle, and the openings of other objects.
Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, who was born in Khorfakkan in 1962 and studied archaeology in Lahore and psychology at Al Ain University, has recently put together some exquisite black-and-white patterns using Indian ink on paper; Hussain Sharif, born in Dubai in 1961 and the founder of the Emirates Fine Art Society, is the creator of Strike, a powerful sculpture created in 2002, of wire figures made out of twisted black wire. From a distance, it is as chaotic and amorphous as as a Jackson Pollock painting. "It characterises a mass walkout," Sharif says. "Around 500 figures represent different people in different situations, weak individually but strong together."
And combined strength and bullishness is the force that drives The Flying House. According to Jos Clevers, globalisation during the 1990s did more than anything to help a home-grown Emirati art movement gain recognition and encouragment. "People are now having to realise that contemporary art is not just happening in Europe and America, it is happening in India and China, and it is happening here. It is a global language and we are speaking it."
Abdulraheem Sharif's vision is slightly more romantic. "The function of contemporary art is to provoke the vision to talk to the mind," he says. "But it must provoke it in an aggressive way, because otherwise, art is harmless, it's only paint on canvas or paper and glue. The meaning of art is to keep people awake and keep them moving." With all the banging, twisting and scraping that goes on in this house, there seems to be no danger of that. @email:rbehan@thenational.ae