Dear Editors of The Gazelle,

Ramadan Kareem.

We write to you in reference to the column published in The Gazelle’s Issue 202, Two Angry South Asian Women Making Sense Of The Mina Zayed Exhibition.

Both Warehouse421 and Gulf Photo Plus are extremely pleased to see that your community is engaging critically and publicly with exhibitions on display. Art and creative expression are only impactful when they bring out the voices of not only the artists, but also the surrounding community. The article questions the role of art institutions in documenting and archiving, and we believe it is important to encourage critical conversations. Different communities — whether educational, creative, or non-institutional — often have constructive critique and mindful dialogue among their own members, but cross-communal conversations tend to be limited, private and often antagonistic. The reason our Artistic Development Exhibition Program focuses on an exhibition outcome is to encourage critical engagement with various urgent and emergent topics, led not by institutional voices but rather by those of the artists and creative practitioners. This is also why most of Warehouse421 exhibitions for the next few years are programmed as open calls and why GPP’s summer exhibitions have been produced via call-outs for a number of years, alongside the ongoing art programs that are free and designed to be accessible to the wider community.

Mina Zayed, as it sits on the cusp of fundamental change, is a significant and fraught site for myriad reasons, including those mentioned in the article. It has been and continues to be an important public space for many communities in Abu Dhabi — to name only a few: the South Asian plant market shopkeepers, the Iranian fruit-and-vegetable market shopkeepers, the Levantine truck drivers, the Emiratis and members of various communities that spent most of their childhood in Mina Zayed, who worked, dined, shopped and even got married there — and extensions of each of these communities feel deep affinities to this place. It is a space of precarity and subsistence and not just a little bit of nostalgia.

The article in reference here does what many of us do when faced with other communities’ explorations of what we feel is ours. It is protective and for good reason, and we sincerely regret that Nandini Kochar and Lubnah Ansari, who are also visual creative practitioners, had not applied to add their voices to this program when the open call was announced in January 2020, or during the public artist talks held after the opening. Their tenacious inquisitiveness would have enriched the program exponentially, and we are grateful that they persisted in contributing to the conversation through the article — this has always been the main objective of this program.

The conversations that were had between the artists and the writers were rich and extended, and we see the uncertainty that the article brushes off as a counter to criticality as an essential part of critical reflection. The artists spent a year thinking in and about Mina Zayed, they met regularly for critique and discussion of their projects and approaches amongst themselves and with guest artists, and each one of them reflected time and time again on their own positionality in the area, on complicity in power structures and on commonalities across communities. Even in 2020, a year ravaged by a pandemic and where communities dug deeper in their silos, the program made sure they didn’t arrive into the area to snap the shutter and leave, but to spend time and think about such a space in a phase of precarious liminality.

We hope these conversations continue, both on the pages of The Gazelle and beyond, and our support will always be extended to platforms, institutions and individuals that work towards inclusive, constructive and non-alienating dialogues for the betterment of society.

Sincerely,

Faisal Al Hassan & Mohamed Somji