Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia – Venice Biennale 2024

His practice centres on journeys exploring the region where he was raised and lives as he attempts to capture the passage between present and past, between remembering and forgetting

Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Ismail Noor of Seeing Things.

National Pavilion UAE, Arsenale, Venice
20 April – 24 November 2024 

by LILLY WEI

Abdullah Al Saadi is the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirate’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale, the exhibition curated by Tarek Abou El Fetouh, director of performance and senior curator at the Sharjah Art Foundation. Al Saadi, who was born in 1967 (just before unification) in Khorfakkan, on the east coast of the UAE, was a crucial figure in the evolution of Emirati contemporary art, part of a pioneering group of avant-garde artists known as the Five (Al Saadi, Hassan Sharif, Hussein Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim). His prolific output is multidisciplinary and includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, performance and photography. Singular, even quixotic, his hybrid, experiential, process-impelled practice is centred on journeys that explore the region where he was raised and still lives. His themes are that of memory and the loss of memory; preservation and ephemerality; tradition and modernisation and made me think of British artist Hamish Fulton’s transformative walks and the equally transformative writings of WG Sebald.

Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Ismail Noor of Seeing Things.

Like its title, Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia, the exhibition balances opposites, featuring eight of Al Saadi’s artworks, each representing a particular journey. However, their components are multiple, deposited in metal chests to be literally unpacked, a picaresque, durational project that is an epic divided into chapters, its effect cumulative. It is essentially performative, the documentation of an experience that is both uncertain, open-ended, and defined by specific constraints such as time limits and particular tasks to be performed based on the materials that he has brought with him, for example, metal baking sheets (toubay) for making bread in Al-Toubay Journey (2013). He periodically travels from his home, usually on foot or by bicycle, sometimes by car, and, at times in the past, accompanied by his donkey Camar Cande and his dog. Camar Cande’s Journey (2010-2011) was the first trip he took with his donkey, one he repeated several times following the original route but not always on foot, the repetition of trips typical since he knows that each will be different. The terrain he crosses is uneven, rugged, mountainous in places, and can be arduous to pass through, especially if transporting heavy materials on a bicycle or pushing a wheelbarrow. When he feels that he and his surroundings have achieved a mutual state of immersion, an equilibrium of sorts between the external world and internal being, Al Saadi begins writing in his diary, reflecting, making notes, drawing and painting, and collecting objects that he finds as he walks the same land as his forbears. On returning to his studio, he numbers and categorises the trip, adding thoughts, his act of preserving also an act of letting go.

Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Ismail Noor of Seeing Things.

When asked about his wanderings, Al Saadi explained that the impulse to travel derives in large part from the patterns of his family’s seasonal rotations as a child, migrating from their date palm farm in a village in Madha to the coastal cities of Khorfakkan, Masafi and Fujairah, travels which later took him further afield, to Europe, Japan, South America and the Antarctic. And yet, in another kind of opposition or act of resistance, this well-travelled artist is also known to be extraordinarily reclusive.

The Purl and Silk Journey, scrolls and drawings. Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Ismail Noor of Seeing Things.

The pavilion’s installation suggests a three-dimensional rendition of the landscape that Al Saadi travels through, replicating his mappings. The thin curvilinear tubing of light that wends its way overhead corresponds to the serpentine winding of the glass display cases below that in turn parallel the meanderings of the floor design, the shimmer of the glass reflected on the floor like light, shadow and water. The works on the walls include paintings and drawings from his Gramophone Journey by Bicycle (2023), his most recent peregrinations. His style is beguiling in its immediacy and the freshness of his palette, its naivety contradicted by the wisdom of folk art and while a spirit of whimsy enlivens his works, they are also grounded by their matter-of-factness. For Gramophone Journey, he brought an unwieldy old-time gramophone and a cache of records with him on his bicycle as well as rolls of canvas on which to paint or draw.

An unfurled drawing. Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Ismail Noor of Seeing Things.

The canvases are shown unrolled here although most often they are stored away and he reveals them in sections, much in the way he experiences his trips, in the way we all experience our journeys, existential and otherwise – bit by bit, not knowing the end until it arrives. Another series, The Purl and Silk Journey (2015), is graphite on canvas and achromatic; the scroll format of both reminds us that he studied painting in Kyoto. This journey revolves around the history of breadmaking and tea, equating the road he travelled with the legendary Silk Route. Also on view on the walls and the glass display tables are multiple painted and inscribed stones that he has collected on his trips, a trove of miniature pictographs and petroglyphs.

Stacked metal chests. Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Ismail Noor of Seeing Things.

In the back of the pavilion are shelves of stacked, giddily painted metal chests readily available in local marketplaces. They are also portable, underscoring the culture of nomadism that was still the norm when Al Saadi came of age. His generation witnessed the social changes that upended the region’s historical precedents that, for better and worse, were worldwide, spurred by the technological advances that enabled globalisation. Visitors could request to see a particular chest, and an obliging staff member – an actor recruited for the occasion responded when I asked – would pull it down, open it and discuss its contents, which might be a drawing, a poem, a stone or other object, mirroring the characteristic rituals of a visit to Al Saadi’s studio. Among the chests I chose was one designated poetry, containing a short poem, which was translated (I am paraphrasing): the sky is an oven, the moon a loaf of bread, and ending with the lusty proclamation that the narrator will eat the moon with gusto, unapologetically – which seems admirably practical. 

Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Ismail Noor of Seeing Things.

In these journeys, Al Saadi seems to attempt the impossible, to capture the passage between present and past, between remembering and forgetting, translating the irretrievable through images and text, as have other searchers, dreamers, a quest that is all the more desired and desirable because it is impossible.