With Art Bahrain, the country’s scene begins to flower

In an alleyway in the heart of Block 338, dozens of washbasins filled with soil and plants stand to attention, fixed to a wall with regimented precision.

Round the corner, a row of cacti — with wooden beams forming the stems and rusty nails representing the spines — line a wall and the roundabouts are festooned not with the usual coffee pots or national symbols but public art installations, from what looks like a giant stack of matches with blue chairs improbably balanced on it to upside-down birdhouses on scaffolding.

Block 338 in Adliya, Bahrain’s most bohemian neighbourhood, has become a metaphor for an art movement which is gaining momentum in the country. Its cobbled streets are filled with artworks, galleries, antique shops, chic restaurants and bars, festively lit by strings of fairy lights. The country has just launched its own international art fair, with its organisers insisting there is enough of a market to bring the art home. “It is an endeavour to bring international art to Bahrain and to take Bahrain to the world,” says Kaneka Subberwal, the co-founder of Art Bahrain.

“I feel Bahrain is very refined in its culture. It might not shout about it but content-wise, it does so much.”

The four-day event, which will begin on October 12, has a royal patron, Sabika bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa, wife of the Bahraini ruler, but it is privately funded. It is expected to attract 10,000 visitors, including 2,000 collectors, potential buyers and representatives of the art world. A fifty-foot-wide marquee in the grounds of the new Four Seasons Bahrain Bay hotel in Manama will feature 48 booths from around the globe, with gallerists and artists invited to bid for stands priced at Dh33,000 for a 24- square metre space. Fifteen booths have already been sold. Among those confirmed are London’s Albemarle Gallery and Dubai’s Galerie El Marsa and Marsam Mattar while Sheikha Lulwa bint Abdulaziz Al Khalifa and Sheikha Marwa bint Rashid Al Khalifa are among the exhibiting artists. “We are expecting to fill them,” says Clementine Perrins, the British fair director, who has now stepped down from the role.

“We are assisting with accommodation and have deals for beneficial rates for shipping. We have made it reasonable because we want people in. We do not want to alienate people by making it really expensive.”

But is there a market for another regional fair, with Abu Dhabi and Dubai already competing for a small pool of high-end collectors? And will Art Bahrain’s subsidised costs unfairly distort the market? “I am sure prices will go up next year, but the first year has to be something people can be a part of,” says Perrins, a former director of the Louis Blouin Foundation, a London-based not-for-profit cultural space. “We are aiming to have about 200 top buyers. There are a lot of Bahraini buyers who travel to Dubai [to buy art] and we want to bring them home.”

A key element to the fair, however, will be enticing new buyers to invest in art, with most pieces priced from Dh37,000, up to Dh918,000.

“It is not necessarily about having a $36 million Picasso. The market we are looking at is where people feel confident to buy and invest so it will be mid-range to high-end.”

Equally, fair organisers are anxious galleries do not focus on bringing expensive works and end up disappointed when they do not sell. If they seem cautious, it is perhaps because Bahrain is only just putting out its feelers to the region, let alone the rest of the world.

While artists featured in the fair will include Tunisian artist Nja Mahdaoui, Emirati artist Mattar Bin Lahej, Jamal Abdul Rahim, from Bahrain and whose paintings and sculptures are held in the collections of the British Museum and Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum, and the British-born Sacha Jafri, who will begin his 18-year retrospective world tour from Bahrain, others are less established.

With no art school, artists often working in isolation and a disjointed policy from the government, there is little unity or collaboration between artists and the art movement is fragmented — meaning it is often overlooked by the rest of the region, says Bayan Kanoo, the Iraqi-born director of Al Riwaq Art Space in Adliya. “Even the word manama means a place to sleep,” she says. “Here they are used to someone coming from outside, holding on to their hands and doing things together. It comes from being isolated and being on an island. Things happen more organically.

“If you look at the history of Bahrain, there is no policy toward art. There has been this sudden wake-up in the Gulf [art scene] but we are still in the 1980s here.”

Yet Bahrain’s modern art movement has been steadily growing since the 1950s, when the Arts and Literature Club was first founded. It is surely no coincidence a rash of expressionist and surrealist artists from Bahrain, like Rashid Oraifi, Nasser Yousif, Abdulla Al Muharraqi and Sheikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa — a painter and the patron of the Bahrain Art Society — were born or came of age in that era.

And things are changing, slowly but surely. A crop of commercial galleries, including Al Riwaq and Albareh, opened in the late 1990s. Al Riwaq, now a not-for-profit organisation aiming to recognise and nurture emerging talent in the Arab world, began hosting annual design and public art festivals in 2011, which take over the streets of Adliya for several weeks with sculptures and conceptual art, workshops for children and a host of seminars.

Called The Nest, it will run again at the end of this year, over six weeks, with an open invitation for artists in the Gulf to take part.

And in 2003 Sheikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, Bahrain’s culture and information minister, announced a $100 million (Dh367m) package to restore the historic Muharraq neighbourhood, once the capital and epicentre of the pearling industry. Seventeen traditional old homes along a three-kilometre stretch were restored, including Bin Matar House, a 1905 family mansion converted into a museum and exhibition space. But it was left to private banks like Arcapita, which went bankrupt in 2012, to fund the project. Sheikha Mai, an author and historian, turned to government funding when the private sector was hit by the 2009 recession.

Similarly, La Fontaine Centre of Contemporary Art was born as a private venture. Fatima Alireza decided to rescue her pearl merchant father's dilapidated family home 11 years ago. Its elegant arches and cloisters are now reminiscent of a contemporary French château and the venue is often host to film nights and exhibitions, like the current Encounters show, a series of portraits of Arab artists by Dubai-based photographer Sueraya Shaheen.

The lack of a cohesive policy can hinder artists’ development, says Kanoo.

“Our asset in Bahrain is not the money, it is the people. In places like Saudi and Qatar, everything is moved by decision. Here it is decided by the people. There is no investment in people but they are largely investing in themselves.”

Outside Al Riwaq, more than half the plants in the washbasins, part of the previous year’s art festival at the gallery, have died. A few are limping on, straggly green shoots poking through dried soil. It seems an apt metaphor for the struggles of Bahraini artists.

Tahira Yaqoob is a regular contributor to The National.