Ways of Seeing

It was a quote from visual culture critic John Berger that sparked the idea for a unique exhibition. “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” he penned, five decades ago.

The remark, made in his 1980 book About Looking, resonated with Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath – the founders of multi-disciplinary curatorial platform Art Reoriented (among their many hats), and cocurators of Ways of Seeing, an exhibition currently provoking thought at NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery.

“Berger confronts us with a conundrum, which, along with its solution, illustrates the curatorial point of departure for this exhibition,” the duo explains.

His written example is worth a recap, to put this UAE-based showcase into context.

To communicate his idea, Berger used a particular work from the celebrated Turkish 19 th -century artist Şeker Ahmed Pasha: a large, oil-on-canvas painting called The Woodcutter and the Forest.

“There is something deeply but subtly strange about the perspective, about the relationship between the woodcutter with his mule, and the far edge of the forest in the top righthand corner,” he annotated. “You see that it is the far edge, and, at the same time, that third distant tree (a beech?) appears nearer than anything else in the painting. It simultaneously withdraws and approaches.”

Bardouil and Fellrath interpret Berger’s analysis as such: “He attributes the painting’s unique, yet puzzling perspective to Ahmed’s attempt at reconciling two opposite visual styles: European landscape painting, and the Ottoman pictorial tradition. The former, Berger tells us, is inherently dependent on linearity where the dichotomy of near and far, distance and scale, constrains our experience of space within a notion of temporality where time can only unfold chronologically. The latter, Berger contends, is free from such rigid parameters. In a miniature, the viewer is confronted with a whole vision of the world, man, and history at once.”

Space, they go on to say, “is spiritual, not physical. Light, rather than illuminating a picture’s subjects, emanates from them. Ahmed’s resolve to bridge two formally different painting traditions led him to create an artwork that at once oscillated between worlds, yet occupied its own distinct visual universe.”

Here’s the crux: Bardouil and Fellrath say Berger’s Woodcutter example “illustrates the original process by which artists make use of a plethora of compositional elements, in order to physically articulate an idea – rendering concrete what initially begins as an intangible image.”

It sparked an idea in the pair to organise an art event that “facilitates a return towards a revised vision of the artist,” they outline.

Their intent is a return to looking at the maker of things: “a skilled technician, who through their understanding and handling of the physical properties of things can alter our way of seeing the world”.

The resulting showcase in Abu Dhabi brings together 26 artists through 41 works, spanning a variety of media from painting, sculpture and photography to sound, film and installation.

Internationally acclaimed efforts by Salvador Dalí and Cindy Sherman are present, while there’s a contemporary touch added by artist such as Swiss based duo Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger, with a local flavour represented by the likes of Emirati princess Lateefa Bint Maktoum.

Within each of the artworks on display, every artist has “employed a number of compositional strategies that allow for an unexpected way of seeing, and, therefore, comprehending anew the respective subject of the artwork at hand,” the curators elaborate.

“Through an acute process of formal negotiations, each artist has managed to articulate a renewed vision of objects, places, and concepts; dislocating them from a wide spectrum of familiar guises through which they have been portrayed, associations with which they have been entangled, and contexts in which they have usually been seen.”

Each of the assembled artworks also evidences “painstaking commitment, not exclusively to the idea that it represents and the respective politics underpinning it, but to the subjective chain of formal decisions of adoption and elimination, translation and appropriation, that each artist has made in order to articulate the visual manifestation of that idea until the very last second of its execution.”

The museum, meanwhile, believes Berger’s thesis is particularly relevant to the UAE, the nation being ‘a heterogeneous society that is grappling with questions of modernisation and tradition against a backdrop of accelerated cosmopolitanism.’

“The exhibition’s title embeds within it a premise a cautionary note, a subliminal instruction: consider the way in which you are seeing. Now, reconsider it,” muses Maya Allison, Galleries Director of NYU.

“If there are different ways of seeing, what does that mean for the study of art? Or politics? Or empirical evidence and data? With this exhibition, we invite scholars, students, and lay people from all fields to consider how they look at the world around them.”

A video montage of birds fluttering over the heads of citizens (in Claerbout’s The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment); a visual slice of history by Gustav Metzger, hidden behind a curtain which the observer must slip behind to view; a huge, full canvas composite capture of Dubai World, by Gursky. What do pieces such as these communicate?

Well, it all comes back to Berger. His game-changing BBC series Ways of Seeing, “shifted the locus of art criticism away from the socalled professional art-expert, relocating it within the grasp of the lay viewer,” the curators highlight.

“To curate an exhibition on the topic of the ways in which we see is itself a kind of meta-curatorial act,” adds Allison. However one chooses to interpret this narrativerich bounty, for the art observer it makes for an enriching visit to Abu Dhabi; that much is plain to see.