Any visitor could be forgiven for thinking that Dubai is a city without a soul, a place of no culture and little visible past. It is, after all, a city that prides itself on bling and artifice, a fantastical skyline of blinking towers springing out of the flat desert and islands confected in the form of palm trees and maps of the world. Almost everything is imported, including its predominantly immigrant population.

Until now, one would have been tempted to have listed fine art among the commodities brought to the city rather than created within it. But Emirati art and Dubai, it seems, is coming of age.

In the past, the number of artists working in the United Arab Emirates was relatively small, not least because art was considered more of a hobby than a viable profession. Teaching was run on a mentoring system, and the work that was produced had little public exposure. All that is changing fast. The past few years have seen an extraordinary growth in a wide range of contemporary art practices. This comes as a result of changing educational possibilities – the return of artists who studied overseas plus new courses on offer by the likes of the American University of Sharjah and Dubai’s Zayed University – and to the Gulf’s sudden, dramatic exposure to international modern and contemporary art.

According to Hassan Sharif, the British-trained “father” of conceptual art in the Emirates, it was the 2003 Sharjah Biennial that “changed the artistic landscape of the UAE”. That year the directorship of the show was taken over by Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi, the daughter of the Ruler of Sharjah, who had studied at London’s Royal College of Art. With the help of curator Peter Lewis, she set a new agenda, not only by bringing in artists from all over the world but new media too – video, installation, digital and performance art – and organised a symposium focusing on globalisation and these new practices.

Christie’s went on to stage its first high-profile auction of international modern and contemporary art in Dubai in 2006, and the first editions of the UAE’s two thriving international art fairs, Art Dubai and ArtParis Abu Dhabi, followed in 2007 (this year’s Art Dubai, March 18-21, coincides with the Sharjah Biennial). Bonhams staged its inaugural Dubai auction last year, and Phillips de Pury has announced its plans for auctions later this year. All these events offer a showcase to established and emerging talent in the region alongside Western – and Asian – art and all have the support of the various UAE governments that are investing large sums in building museums and promoting culture in the region.

It is the bustling, international hub of Dubai that has emerged as the commercial, and arguably also the creative, heart of art in the Emirates. What is significant about this flowering of workshops and courses, commercial galleries and, no less essentially, the critical discussion of art is that it has grown organically out of a groundswell of initiatives independent of government.

Most impressive among the city’s new galleries, for instance, The Third Line, was established just four years ago in Dubai’s Al Quoz industrial district by the Americans Claudia Cellini and Sunny Rahbar, and Omar Ghobash, an Oxford-educated Emirati and “patron of the arts that are yet to be”, now also the UAE ambassador to Russia. The gallery offers a local and international platform to cutting-edge artists who are working in the Middle East or in the diaspora but it also hosts non-profit programmes nurturing an appreciation of Arab literature and film.

In a similar spirit of encouraging informed debate, Jyoti Dhar, who opened the Bagash Art Gallery to show Indian and middle-eastern contemporary art in Dubai four years ago, launched ChinarTree.com as a resource for artists, students, critics and collectors. Dubai also saw its first non-profit artists’ collective when Hassan Sharif’s brother established The Flying House two years ago.

To visit Dubai’s latest art initiative, I drove just out of the city to Nad Al Shiba. It seemed a different world. Nad Al Shiba is famous for its horse-racing track, home to the highest purse in the racing world. There is a sense of space and tranquility. Birds sing. Just beyond the police station and the health centre is Tashkeel (pictured), the brainchild of its founding director Sheikha Lateefa Al Maktoum, the 24-year-old daughter of Sheikh Maktoum Al Maktoum, the UAE’s first prime minister in 1971 and ruler of Dubai until his death in 2006.

There is nowhere like Tashkeel anywhere in the Emirates. Its name, Sheikha Lateefa tells me, was given by her mother, a poet, and means variety and derives from the word for fine art. Although not a huge building, it finds the space for state-of-the-art exhibition galleries, painting, printmaking and silk-screen studios, an impressive Mac lab offering large-scale digital printing, a photographic darkroom, a film studio, a jewellery workshop, a well-stocked library of international art periodicals, an artists’ supplies shop and a members’ room.

Sheikha Lateefa, like her older sister Sheikha Hessah, is a practising artist, a painter and photographer. When working on a graduate exhibition of work by Emirati artists she realised that although these artists knew of one another, they worked in isolation after graduation and most of them had never met. She decided to create a space for a community of artists, a place where they could meet, work – there are no other public-access facilities of this kind – exchange ideas, learn from one another and exhibit their work. “All the studio rooms flow into one another, so everyone can walk around, have a look at what others are doing and start a dialogue,” she explains. “You can’t grow alone; you need to be challenged by people.”

When I walked through Tashkeel’s doors I was greeted by the stately procession of monumental steel mesh thobs, the generic Arab dress, of “Emra’a”, or “Woman”, an installation by British-born Patricia Mills, who has been working in the middle east for 30 years. The billowing folds of each contain dried flowers, seeds and herbs of the region: welcoming roses, healing yarrow, culinary mint, cloves, hibiscus and lemons.

Other spaces were devoted to a video and lenticular photography installation by the Canadian Janet Bellotto and the work of two Emirati, the photo-journalist Alia Al Shamsi and conceptual artist Muna Al Ali, both of whom deal with the changing urban and social landscape of Dubai. There was also much talk about Tashkeel’s forthcoming open exhibition planned to coincide with Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial.

It was at last year’s show that Rem Koolhaus and Jack Persekian found recent graduate Reem al Ghaith and invited her to exhibit at “Dubai Next” at the Vitra Design Museum alongside the 2008 Art Basel. Her work is now on show at “Emirati Expressions”, at the Emirates Palace Hotel, Abu Dhabi, until April 16.

What is striking about this band of young Emirati artists is how they articulate the anxieties of a whole, mostly unseen generation, issues of identity and loss in a homeland that their grandparents would not recognise. Perhaps their work is an imprint of the soul of Dubai which, for better or worse, offers up a rich and complex source of inspiration.

www.tashkeel.org
www.artdubai.ae
www.sharjahbiennial.org
www.artsabudhabi.com