SCRAPS by Dariush Zandi and Shaqayeq Arabi, Total Arts Gallery, Dubai (2009)

 Marcelo Guimarães Lima

SCRAPS is a collaborative installation with found objects, sculptural works and photographs  by Dariush Zandi and Shaqayeq Arabi,. The couple has lived and worked in Dubai for many years as artists and  also directing Total Arts Gallery. This is the first public show of their artistic collaboration. 

The project started with  a "chance encounter" with the site of a man made disaster:  the explosion and fire of an Al Quoz warehouse.  Al Quoz is an industrial and commercial area in the city of Dubai, and is also the place where Total Art is located, as well as other contemporary art galleries. The Al Quoz district presents today an interesting  amalgam of disparate activities that reflects the rapid pace of development of the city and reflects also the not uncommon process by which the planned development of urban spaces  is  revised and transformed, beyond original directives  and intentions, by the many everyday decisions of different urban actors.  A visit to the neighboring remains of the burnt warehouse by the two artist started a process that would lead to the present exhibition. 

At first, it was simply the fascination with the site and the remains of objects and materials transformed by explosions and fire, out of which emerged distorted metallic structures, amalgamated and fused objects of plastic, paper, aluminum, etc, everyday objects such as toothbrushes, safety pins, plastic bottles and containers fused together into sculptural shapes, the traces and scraps of common objects, together with structural remains and materials. 

Photographing the destruction and the space that resulted,  and collecting the materials, led to the development of a more conscious aesthetic interest and aesthetic relation to the found site, to the materials and objects from which emerged the concept of the present installation. Darius Zandi is a practicing architect and a photographer, Shaqayeq Arabi is a painter, sculptor and installation artist. Both their specific and their common experiences and competences in the visual arts are brought together in the present exhibition. 

Entering the penumbra of the gallery space, with lights focusing forms and objects hanging from the ceiling, displayed on the walls, standing on the floor or on platforms and pedestals, with photographic  projections crossing the space and  crossing within and among  sculptural bodies and metal structures , one is first struck by the total "theatrical" atmosphere and import of  the work. Forms, as well as colors and surfaces produced by fire and smoke transposed in to the gallery space, acquire a distinctive aesthetic quality, or rather, one could say, have their immanent aesthetic qualities recognized and enhanced by a simple change of place, from the everyday world into the space of art.  Art does not imitate life, in this case, but it simply "frames" it. 

Indeed, a common understanding of what an "objet trouvé " (found art object) is states that it is in fact "merely" the unreflected transit of things, a direct communication or transposition from life into art. If that is the case, we  could observe that the aestheticization  of the banal in contemporary art, can be considered as simply the counterpart of the banalization of art, or the banalization of the artistic gesture.  

Since Duchamp and the Surrealists in the early part of the 20th century, the ready made and the  objet trouvé (analogous but not identical concepts and art practices)  have been recognized as an established artistic form. And with the recognition of the ready made as a kind of artistic "genre" in itself, comes also the risks and challenges inherent in the repetition of "inaugural gestures".  Considered however as components of  the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary artists, the found object is one element in a contemporary artistic discourse that interrogates the world itself, it interrogates our time, and, contrary to popular believes about the nature of aesthetic experience, it is not simply content to "color" reality with subjective "points of view".

Accordingly, we can observe that SCRAPS propose to the viewers both an immersive and a contemplative or reflective experience. Its initial "dramatic" effect is counterbalanced by the finely designed arrangements of spatial structures, sculptural forms, amalgamated or isolated objects. Including the remains of a bicycle. Displayed in the gallery space, it inevitably reminds us, not without a hint of  irony, of Duchamp´s ready made- construction "The Bicycle Wheel" (a bicycle wheel fastened  to a kitchen stool) originally created in 1913.

The industrial forms and mass objects transformed by fire, suggest fossilized organic forms and by that an affinity to the surrealists’ “objet trouvés”, that is, natural objects, "naturalized" artificial objects,  strange natural formations, etc, associated with the surrealist “encounter” with the “supra-real” (sur-réel) dimension of reality. If not directly related  to the aesthetics of Surrealism the present works can be  related to the poetics of the surrealists, that is, their artistic productive strategies. Transformed by fire, these objects of human work, the products of human industry, return to dust, to nature. These  products of a society of unlimited consumption return to the condition and the form  of the inorganic in nature.

But not only Duchamp has been "remade" in the burning furnace of an exploding warehouse in Al Quoz. Scissors sculpturally fused together into a compact and yet finally  articulated metal bloc, remake the "accumulations" and serial sculptural works of French-American artist Arman. Arman created art from the serialized mass objects that populate our world. The precise and clean forms of  industrially produced objects were rearranged into elegant sculptural forms. 

Dariush Zandi and Shaqayeq Arabi perform in SCRAPS not only the role of the "archaeologists of the future", excavating the remains of life systems in the artificially recreated soil of a destroyed industrial deposit in modern Dubai,  but also the roles of  "art historians of the future" extricating from the ashes of our present condition the artistic layers of  visions and  forms that are part of our understanding of the world. 

Indeed, one  important part of Dariush Zandi´s professional expertise and practice is architectural restoration of buildings and sites. In his own architectural works, the recycling of materials of previous constructions goes together with the post-modern recycling of forms and appropriations or quotations of a diversity of concepts and styles. His artistic practice includes photography as a central discipline. Given also the fact that photography itself is a kind of “found object”, that is, in one way or the other, the photographic object is a the result of an encounter with reality, that is, a vision born out the material imprint of light on a sensitive surface, we can point out here the sources and concepts of SCRAPS from the artist´s previous experiences.

The very notion of “scraps”, making art of discarded materials brings to mind the frenzy of construction that has been the mark of modern Dubai with its accelerated pace of development. A frenzy of construction that  creates material and perhaps also human “refuse”, exhausted, discarded, used and unusable elements. 

Making art out of refuse, waste, garbage was also the goal of  ARTE POVERA in the late 1960s. The richly sensuous elements, the unusually transformed materials and  the dramatic dimension of SCRAPS are certainly at odds with the rather "minimalist", that is muted and restrained, aims and methods of ARTE POVERA. In contrast, we can say that SCRAPS does not appear to fear a certain "excess" of the dramatic or refrain from the spectacular. These are however conscious ways of highlighting the "artificial", that is the constructed in the artwork itself. It is because the artist can produce and master a significant relationship with reality that contemporary art is able to open itself to things as they are, that is as they present themselves, and as they become.

photos by Dariush Zandi - Total Arts Gallery