Sahan floor design by Kevin Dean at Abu Dhabi’s Grand Mosque

Just as the fractious relationship between the Montagues and the Capulets electrified the romance between Romeo and Juliet, so combining the seemingly antithetical cultural viewpoints of the Middle East and the west can make for scintillating marriages in arts and design. From November 19, the inaugural Abu Dhabi Art fair will employ the city’s ancient position as a trading route crossroads to highlight the significance of the interaction of the two cultures.

Traditional Islamic design is renowned the world over for its use of elegant geometric pattern, technical innovation and artistic harmony. Now its thriving union with contemporary western practice is producing some eloquent work.

One such example is the textile designer Kevin Dean. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, his work features themes of flora and fauna. Dean’s career quite literally blossomed out of all proportion when he was commissioned by the late Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahyan and one of his sons, Sheikh Sultan bin Zayed al-Nahyan, to create a marble mosaic version of one of his floral designs for the 18,000 sq metre courtyard floor of Abu Dhabi’s Grand Mosque.

Completed in March 2008, the mosque is one of the largest in the world. Those of us who find it vexing to arrange so much as a bunch of tulips in a vase will sympathise with Dean’s initial trepidation at the prospect of arranging flower patterns over an area larger than a football field. But perhaps the true visionaries were Sheikh Zayed and his son, who was deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates at the time, for commissioning something other than a traditional Islamic floor design from a British craftsman.

“To the best of my knowledge, I’m the first westerner to be commissioned to do something like that and it was a huge privilege,” says Dean, who recently won an award in the London International Creative Competition. “I think there might have been some conservative elements who didn’t like it but Sheikh Sultan said they wanted to make it very different from other mosques and to do something very new that would break with tradition.”

Seldom can the message conveyed by a bunch of flowers have been more expensive. Dean reckons that the courtyard floor alone (there were three others too), cost several million dollars.

‘Water Lily’ by Sara Salman

“They started as original drawings,” he explains. “For the main courtyard I used flowers that can be found in the Middle Eastern region: mostly irises, tulips, lilies and roses. They were free-flowing and placed at the north, south, east and western corners of the mosque to reflect the universal character of the Islamic faith.”

Dean’s greatest challenge was to imagine how the whole thing would look on a scale that was unimaginable when he was sitting at his drawing board. “I would think, ‘That petal is going to be as big as this whole room. That flower will be over four metres in diameter’,” he says. He travelled between his London home, Abu Dhabi and Fantini Mosaici, the fabricators in Italy, while working on the courtyard design.

“In Italy we selected the most appropriate marble colours to suit my design,” he says. “In all there are about 30 colours in marble that occur naturally.”

The computer-aided working drawings were laid on to the marble, which was then cut using a water-jet and mounted on to concrete slabs. The whole floor was then shipped to Abu Dhabi in multitudinous marble segments – a bit like a heavily embellished outsized jigsaw puzzle. Each part of each flower was cut from a marble slab, still using a water-jet and the marble pieces were then stuck to a 4-metre concrete section using a very strong adhesive. Tiny chips of white marble mosaic were then put around the coloured marble, attached with more tile adhesive to fuse the segments.

“At one point there were about 400 men chipping and laying these bits,” recalls Dean. Understandably, the Grand Mosque has become something of a tourist attraction since it opened last March. Sadly, Sheikh Zayed died before the mosque bearing his name was completed.

For German-born contemporary furniture designer Katrin Greiling, who trained and worked for most of her professional life in Stockholm, a chance meeting at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan led her to move to Dubai to work with Traffic, the Middle East’s first design gallery. Traffic displays furniture, lighting and other house and home items by both world-renowned designers and from up-and-coming regional talents in a 7,000 sq ft showroom.

“Dubai is very influenced by western ideals and you need to really dig deep to find the Arab culture from which to draw your own design inspirations,” says Greiling. But find it she did, in the remote Dubai countryside and the wider emirates. Inspiration was not a religious or cultural monument but a camel beauty contest in the middle of an oasis.

“I’ve always been attracted to the nomadic Bedouin way of life and since I got here I’ve travelled around the whole region,” says Greiling. “Then I chanced upon this camel beauty festival attended by hundreds of families who came from very far afield and just pitched their tents in this huge area, right in the middle of the desert for two weeks or more.”

These wondrously decorated animals and especially the family tents were the inspiration for Greiling’s next project, the lounge at the forthcoming Art Dubai contemporary art fair, where she somehow blended Bedouin Arab with the kind of Swedish functional style popularised by Ikea.

“The Bedouin tent is rectangular and there are cushions and mattresses in a U shape around the edges plus larger cushions and carpets in the middle,” explains Greiling. “The richer the families, the larger the cushions and the more carpets. Everything has to be flexible. It is incredibly luxurious but it must be portable.”

What most struck Greiling was the “transformation of objects” from one use to another. “The camel seat is an incredibly important object. It’s brought into the tent and placed on the floor so that when they sit on the ground, people lean over the camel seat with their arms,” she says. “I can also see the connection between these camel seats and the way they have developed into pillars in people’s homes.”

Bedouin sofas by Katrin Greiling

At Art Dubai, Greiling created her Bedouin-style lounge by stacking and stapling a series of sofas, ottomans and benches together to create a similar effect.

If little of Dubai’s architecture reflects its barren landscape, the city has proved to be a land of plenty for the countless architects and designers who have flooded there from the west in the past 10 years – albeit more of a trickle since the market downturn. Not that Dubai represents any kind of showcase for Middle Eastern design or even culture, believes Egyptian furniture designer Karim Mekhitigian, who lives and works in Cairo.

“A city grows out of a culture and its people, not the other way around,” Mekhitigian argues, though he equally does not regard Egypt as a high water-mark of Middle Eastern design. “Egyptian design today, it just doesn’t exist,” he says. He believes the reasons for this are political. “We’ve had 50 to 60 years with no real education, no consciousness, no middle class.”

Critically, Egypt’s reliance on generic machine-manufactured goods and industrialisation means it has lost its traditional skills base and thus a key part of its cultural heritage. Mekhitigian’s mission is to develop a new Egyptian design identity. To that end, he both designed and contributed to Kyme – a project combining the skills of seven Egyptian and international designers with those of Egyptian furnituremakers – whose first fruits were unveiled at this year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile.

“What is interesting and important is that designers from the Mediterranean can give something different that translates into another design language,” says Mekhitigian. “For example, in London the table is more functional, a thing that you eat from. But in Cairo it is first and foremost a gathering place. It is what happens around the table that is important and not the table itself. Culturally, elements translate differently. We want to create a lot more dialogue between the Middle East and the occident, to elevate both.”

Margot Stone, development manager at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London, believes that not only are many of the traditional Islamic decorative arts such as ceramic tiles are dying out in parts of the Middle East but that mass production techniques have exported a homogenised Islamic design throughout the region. To counter this, the school has established a diploma course at the Al-Fustat Ceramic centre in Cairo and has been working with local craftsmen there on rediscovering local phraseology and style. A second centre is likely to open in Abu Dubai in the near future.

In the middle of the 19th century British architect William Morris cited Islamic art as one of his sources of inspiration. “To us pattern designers, Persia has become a holy land, for there, in the process of time, our art was perfected,” he said. With the ongoing interest in Islamic art today, that seed of truth continues to flourish in many and varied ways.

Abu Dhabi Art runs November 19-22
www.abudhabiartfair.ae

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‘1001 Pages’ by Afruz Amighi

‘Islamic art isn’t a relic. It’s alive and growing’

In July, a new international prize for a contemporary artist or designer for work inspired by the Islamic tradition of craft and design was launched by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and supported by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel of Saudi Arabia, a businessman and patron of the arts. Jameel hopes the prize will raise awareness of the thriving interaction between contemporary practice and the region’s artistic heritage and contribute to a broader debate about Islamic culture. He also provided the funding for the renovation of the V&A’s Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, which opened in July 2006.

More than 100 nominations for the first prize were received, ranging from jewellery and photo- montage to turned woodwork and screen prints. The winner of the £25,000 prize was Afruz Amighi, who was born in Tehran but has lived most of her life in New York. Amighi employs a stencil burner to hand cut an Islamic design from a thin porous sheet of plastic, the same material used to make refugee tents. The work is suspended from the ceiling and an overhead projector illuminates the piece, casting an intricately patterned shadow against the wall.

Afruz Amighi

“I think it wasn’t really until I was an adult that a lot of things in my life really came together aesthetically,” says Amighi. “Growing up I lived in a lot of houses where the carpets weren’t on the floor but hung from the walls. The geometric patterns had always really interested me but I had no idea as to the meaning behind some of the symbols. So I became a scholar as much as an artist and went back into Islamic history and researched their significance. For me the most important thing is to show that Islamic art isn’t a closed book. It’s not some kind of relic that people go to for research purposes. It’s alive and growing in all sorts of interesting and imaginative ways.”