BRANCH OF THE MUSEUM OF SOLOMON GUGGENHEIM IN ABU DHABI - THE FUTURE TREASURE OF MASTERPIECES OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE MIDDLE EAST - PREPARING FOR OPENING IN 2017. HOWEVER ALREADY TODAY THE MUSEUM IS ACTIVELY FILLING UP THE COLLECTIONS AND REPRESENTING AUDIENCE GRANDIER EXPOSITIONS. Text: Natalia Remmer
The museum, which will be located in the cultural quarter on the island of Saadiyat, promises to be the fifth, largest branch of the New York Museum. The permanent collection will include art objects created from the 1960s to the present day. It is not only about the cultural revolution in the West, but also about the formation of the United Arab Emirates itself as a state. As planned, about half of the collection will be the work of artists from the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq and, of course, Iran.
"Today, in a warehouse in Europe, in a well-conditioned and secure room, almost 240 pieces of contemporary art are awaited for their journey to the new museum. Almost half of them were created by artists from the Middle East and North Africa," says the director of the Museum and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum "Richard Armstrong." Some items are very large and expensive to transport. One day they will arrive at their new home in Abu Dhabi, but this day has not yet been determined. "
The first major exhibition of the future collection of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi was the exhibition “Vision Through the Light”, held last winter: it displayed 19 works in the genre of painting, installation and video, demonstrating the evolution of light - active, heavenly, perceptual, reflected and transcendental. The grandiose project presented the works of Angela Bullock, Robert Irwin, Yayoi Kusama, Otto Pine, Monir Shahrudi and other artists.
According to Richard Armstrong, one of the complex phenomena in creating a new museum is to get curators to see the world from a different perspective. "The connection between the organization of the museum space and the objects contained in it is of a symbiotic nature, but the branch in Abu Dhabi will not follow the traditional Western narrative. It will form a new look at the achievements of Arab modernism and the dynamics of its development - in the country and in the region," notes the head of the fund. The architect of the museum is Frank Gehry, a Canadian who stood at the origins of architectural deconstructivism.
Today he is actively working to adapt the project to the existing budget. The design still remains very spectacular, however, huge terraces like football fields still had to be abandoned.
The program director of the branch of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi is a well-known gallery owner and art expert in the Emirates, Sheikh Mays Al Cassimi, who spends her life traveling the world’s cultural space in search of new ideas and subjects. “The Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi is part of a cultural development process that is unprecedented in scale and scope,” said Sheikh Mays. “The development of monumental museums will allow Abu Dhabi to gain the status of a regional cultural center and attract art connoisseurs from around the world to permanent and temporary exhibitions."
According to her, the museum will present a transcultural look at art and will allow us to track the process of its transformation over the past 50 years. Even before the opening, the museum launched an open cultural dialogue, which should contribute to the art formation of the local community, deeper penetration of cultural ideas into the region and their exchange.
