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The Curation by Nour Hassan
The Curation, formerly Radical Contemporary, is a Digital Curator and Podcast based between Cairo, Dubai & Jeddah. We curate everything from art, fashion, and design, to culture, wellness and tech to present you with only the best brands, founders, products and pioneers.
The Curation by Nour Hassan
Maya Allison: On Art, Community, and Cultural Evolution
Prepare to be captivated by the insights of Maya Allison, the Executive Director and Chief Curator at NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, as she reveals the fascinating journey that led her from the RISD Museum to the vibrant art scene of the UAE. Discover her unique perspective on the evolving role of curators, who not only educate but also engage as public intellectuals and creative practitioners. This engaging conversation uncovers the layers of curatorial work, from managing ancient artifacts to contemporary masterpieces, and highlights the joy of connecting art with audiences in meaningful ways.
Finally, explore the dynamic evolution of the UAE’s arts and culture scene, from its participation in the Venice Biennial to the influence of South Asian art. We navigate through pivotal moments that shaped this region's rich art history, underscoring the importance of cross-cultural exchanges. Listen as Maya outlines the future developments at NYU Abu Dhabi Art Galleries, spotlighting their commitment to supporting emerging and mid-career artists. Through substantial exhibitions and publications, these efforts not only elevate individual careers but also contribute to a broader global art discourse.
Ishara Art Foundation
Ishara Art Foundation was founded in 2019 as a non-profit organisation dedicated to presenting contemporary art of South Asia. Located in Dubai, the Foundation supports emerging and established practices that advance critical dialogue and explore global interconnections.
Ishara signifies a gesture, a signal or a hint, and is a word common to several languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Bengali, Swahili and Urdu.
Ishara Art Foundation is presented in partnership with Alserkal.
For more information visit www.ishara.org.
Hello everyone, this is Noor Hassan and you're listening to the Ishara Art Foundation and Radical Contemporary Season. This episode marks our season finale and it was my honor to interview Maya Allison, the Art Gallery's Executive Director and Chief Curator at NYU, abu Dhabi. Maya was also the Curator at the UAE Pavilion Venice Biennale 2022 and she is an advisory board member of Ishara Art Foundation. We cover in great depth what it means to be a curator, and Maya shares with us her curatorial practices and expertise. I think you'll be able to extract great value from this conversation, so, without further ado, here is my episode with Maya Allison. Right now I'm speaking with Maya Allison and it's such an honor to have you as part of our Ishara Art Foundation Radical Contemporary Podcast series. Maya, thank you for agreeing to be on the series with us.
Speaker 2:It's my pleasure. I'm very happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I want to first get into a point we had just mentioned now, prior to recording, which is your career in the curatorial world and the curatorial practices. A lot of people might assume that, working at NYU Abu Dhabi, that you're an educator primarily, but you are a curator primarily. So can you tell me what inspired you to actually take this path into curatorial work?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's interesting because to me, education is not something that stops when you leave the classroom, right? So we're all on journeys of education in all of our lives, and curatorial practice is an interesting sort of hybrid in any context. You know, there are many different kinds of curators. You can be a curator whose job is to interpret a collection and do research about a collection, and the act of interpreting it is, for example, writing a book about a particular object and its history. That does contribute to education, of course. It's also a sort of a curator also plays this kind of public intellectual role in the sense of speaking about ideas with a general audience, as opposed to only in a classroom or only to a specialized audience. And that, to me, is very exciting and important, because there are so many perspectives on every subject and that art can bring together all these perspectives into dialogue that doesn't there's no limit to who can be in that conversation, basically.
Speaker 2:And then the third part that is inspiring to me is that curatorial practice has its own creative practice embedded in it, which is not to say that I think curators should run around taking liberties with artwork and misinterpreting it or misrepresenting it, but it's the curating in the sense of making exhibitions, is one of making connections, drawing parallels, drawing out certain ideas, textures, forms, concepts, histories out certain ideas, textures, forms, concepts, histories, and it gives me kind of a profound, a sense of meaning and purpose.
Speaker 2:That's very similar to what I would get, what you know, what I think an artistic practice can give, which is a sense of contributing to something bigger than yourself, but also trusting your instincts and listening to the ways that we communicate that transcend language and science, because art kind of does this other thing that we wouldn't make art if we could just say it or write it or prove it. Art has another role to play and it's a fundamentally creative one. And so when and it's a different kind of thinking, and so as a curator, I get to partake in that kind of thinking, even though I'm not the one making the work. And I find that type of thinking both really frustrating, because my job is to try to help viewers find a way in, but I can't just explain what the work does. You have to actually experience it or you haven't understood the work. So that's a long answer. But my interest in curatorial practice is an interest in creativity, in education and in exchange with the world around me in all its forms.
Speaker 1:I actually truly enjoyed your answer. I think it's an amazing perspective on curation and the idea that we really wouldn't make art if we could say it. I think that's a brilliant quote. So I want to get into for our audience what led you to NYU, abu Dhabi in particular. In a sense, I think it's a really interesting story. You are the art gallery's executive director and chief curator. What a fascinating position. Can you tell us what brought you to, in the end, the UAE?
Speaker 2:Like many of us, it's not like I woke up when I was 12 years old and said this is my career plan, but what happened was that I kept, and I feel really delighted that this is the career that I found myself in and manifesting in the way that it has, because there was no roadmap for what I'm doing was no roadmap for what I'm doing and in a way, it was a combination of just sheer like good, excellent opportunities combined with a little bit of foolhardy. You know, not knowing any better, that one couldn't do what I was thinking. What I ended up doing, because if I had thought about it too much, if I knew what I know now, I might have thought it wasn't possible. Because what I ended up doing? Because if I had thought about it too much, if I knew what I know now, I might have thought it wasn't possible, because what I did was I was a curator. First. I trained at the RISD Museum, which is essentially a miniature metropolitan it's from mummies to contemporary art and it's a museum that was created for the study of art and design, for the purposes of teaching art students and design students at the Rhode Island School of Design. It was created over 100 years ago and and it has a really the collection has a purpose, and so I became a curator in. I was already curating experimental film and video art and I was hired there as a curatorial assistant, which is a three year position where you sort of cut your teeth on curatorial practice, and then they kept me on for a fourth year as interim curator of contemporary art while my curator was on sabbatical, was on sabbatical.
Speaker 2:So I really got to experience the full gamut of learning to be a curator training other curators, thinking about building a collection, understanding the machinery of how a museum actually works Like this was a very proper museum that followed all the best practices and then creating some of my own exhibitions, but also, you know, working with the curator who was training me, who was a walking encyclopedia of modern and contemporary art of the Western world. She really knew what she was doing. So I really feel really lucky to have trained with her. That was Judith Tannenbaum. But the other thing that I learned was how a museum can interact with the university, right. So every day classes would come in and the curators would teach from the collection or from the exhibition to the classes, and so the curators were recognized as hybrid faculty, so they weren't teaching outside of the museum but they were teaching in the museum and they were doing research and writing books. So I really was trained in the context of the role that a museum can play in a university as part of the teaching and learning curriculum.
Speaker 2:And from there I went on to be the curator at Brown University, literally across the street and up the hill, and there it was a much smaller team. It was just. It was not a full-scale museum, it was just a handful of people making exhibitions, taking care of the collection, and I did. You know some more great exhibitions there. You know some more great exhibitions there. So it was around this time that NYU Abu Dhabi sort of came knocking and invited me to consult on the plan for their university museum and gallery in Abu Dhabi and it began as kind of an exploratory consultancy and it led to me sort of writing a proposal for what it could look like and that wound up being me doing it. So it was a kind of interesting progression from theory to practice.
Speaker 1:That is such an inspiring story, honestly, and I really believe that preparation is key and I really believe that preparation is key and I think a lot of people do believe that. You know a chief curator more examples of projects at NYU Abu Dhabi that you feel really helped cultivate this amazingly curious community that is there at the moment spearheading, actually, a lot of the educational and curatorial work in the region.
Speaker 2:So thank you. There's one aspect of the story that I just told you that then becomes the connecting link to how I ended up staying here for 13 years now, and this, I think, will answer your question, which is that one of the most important shows I worked on while I was at the RISD Museum was called Wonderground Providence, 1995 to 2005. And it was a survey of an underground art scene in Providence, rhode Island, where the RISD Museum is, that was kind of invisible to the people who live in Providence but had a cult following in Japan and Germany and then around the country, because it was a scene that had it brought together noise, music, really innovative screen printing practices, really innovative screen printing practices performance, art, costume, wrestling, matches, you know, I mean these were just like you know, if you imagine Pippi Longstocking, like these crazy kids in a way. Many of them were dropouts and they took over the warehouses on the other side of town and these were not legal sanctioned venues but they were places where these artists were making a commitment to a creative life that was really different from the model that the art world was offering at the time. So instead of, you know, trying to get a big gallery and trying to sell your work for lots of money. They decided screen printing allowed them to make money quickly. Not very much, but then also it made art affordable. So screen printing then became one of their main practices to earn money, but also to advertise their shows, and they would put these coded messages into their screen prints, advertising events that were happening secretly, you know, in their warehouses, their parties. It's just another way of like, you know, inviting your friends to your house, but it was turned into an art form, basically, and so they were.
Speaker 2:What that made me start to think about is what happens when a community is its own validation. Does that make sense If you think about a community instead of relying on New York or London to say your art is good? Their community validated itself, they created its own space, they set up their own printing press, they did their own sort of stealth marketing and they had their own events, and then they became part of a circuit of venues like this around the country, and that got me thinking. You know that's a very punk rock approach and it's not really appropriate. For every context work very differently, but at the core of it is something that is shared with every artistic community that I've looked at, which is that there's a group of people who essentially believe in what they're doing and seek out other people who have that trust in their own practice and then they sort of support each other through the rough times and celebrate each other in the great times and also challenge each other in the great times and also challenge each other. And so that you know, if I'm an artist sitting by myself in my studio, probably I'm going to let myself off the hook a little bit or I'm going to be too hard on myself. So if I have five other artists in my realm that I can talk to about what I'm doing, then that becomes kind of a checks and balances but also an encouragement to go further, because you have a community kind of around you.
Speaker 2:And when I was, when I came to the UAE, I saw, I discovered that that community exists here as well and has existed particularly since the 1970s or 80s, depending on how you count it.
Speaker 2:And that's when I began to realize that the you know, what I saw in Providence wasn't a one-off and that this is a phenomenon that occurs around the world, across cultures.
Speaker 2:You know, we see it in particularly in moments where modernization is creating a lot of pressure on the arts to define itself in new ways, or the arts is leading the questioning of the status quo.
Speaker 2:And it's in those moments of high risk and leaps of faith where community actually becomes the most important.
Speaker 2:Because the you know what do they say if you can go farther together, you can go alone and go fast, or you can go together and go far, and I think this applies in the arts as well. So when you're in a university, this also happens right among students, among faculty, but also the university gallery can play a role in creating that space of sort of encouragement for risk taking, support and the safety net, but also be a place where the community externally can gather to experience and participate in questioning and advancing conversations. So one of the series that we launched last year that I'm really proud of, from my colleague Doigou Demir, is called Curators Talk, and so we bring in curators to speak about their practice, and this has become a forum for emerging curators and artists to come together to think about what exhibitions do. And so this is, I think that kind of dialogue and feeling not isolated, is really critical to the health and sort of oxygenize, oxygenating of of artistic practice.
Speaker 1:It's such a fascinating way that you just described community and how you. You see that there are like unifying factors across the world, which is which is actually it. Really it brings me to my next point, which I mean I want to get more into the galleries at NYU and sort of how they contribute to the broader art landscape in the UAE. At the end of the day, it is a university and that in and of itself is a unique perspective, obviously, but given that you know every year something new is happening biennales, museums opening, etc. Can you just give me a kind of insight into that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's a. Let's see if I can rephrase, reframe this a little bit, because, yes, there's always something new developing, especially, I think, right now in our region. There's this sense of proliferation of arts and culture projects, and one of the luxuries that I have is that I've been here for quite a while, so I've watched this development and I've had a lot of time to think about what it means, where it's going and what this might look like in the future. So when I arrived, I started visiting in 2010 and moved here in the beginning of 2012.
Speaker 2:And so in that period, in 2009, uae had had its first participation in the Venice Biennial, and it was 2008 and 7, 7 and 8, which was when the Saudi projects projects were announced. The national, this English language newspaper was launched, christie's and Sotheby's start participating in the marketplace. Here we see the Farjam Foundation opening. So there's this moment, this watershed moment, right before I arrive, where suddenly all bets are off and everybody's money is on cultural development, never mind that the Sharjah arts sector, arts and culture sector has been active and rich and diverse and generative since 1980. Right. So, 30 years later, in comes this other movement and in a way, for a minute, it kind of eclipses everything else and becomes the main topic of conversation, and there's this idea that there's nothing here, that we're importing art and culture, and nobody seems to. You know, they kind of conveniently don't mention Sharjah, but in fact Sharjah was the founding sort of emirate in this regard. And then Abu Dhabi had the cultural foundation, which was also really important and also often forgotten, and it trained generations of artists, just like Sharjah's Emirates Fine Arts Society did. And so I think it's really one of the things that the narrative often drops is, although the history was quiet and maybe not on the front page of the art newspaper, the history is there, and so what we're seeing now is the fruit of those early foundational institutions from the 80s and 90s throughout the UAE, and then, if you think of that as the roots and the trunk of the tree, is the first 10 years of 2000. And now we're seeing the proliferation of branches which are bearing fruit, and I think that the museums are kind of the sort of you know, then these become the final stage and now we have all the layers necessary to create a healthy ecosystem. So now the university has an MFA, which is a really important part of the ecosystem. The Salama Foundation has been preparing students for MFAs through their one-year fellowship program. There's really so much nourishment now happening.
Speaker 2:What is the gallery's role? So in 2012, the gallery's role, as I started to set it up to open in 2014, was to figure out who's the audience for all of this right. So a lot of our exhibitions it could be thought of as audience testing, as a way of saying, all right, who wants to talk about this? What about this? Who wants to talk about that? And I was going through, you know, I did a show that was a group show, thinking about Sadiat as a place that we imagine as a future for culture. That was the first show was Slavs and Tatars. They're sort of a hip duo who combine thinking from Central Asia and Eastern Europe to make these kind of very playful, witty but incredibly erudite art installations. And then I go to Diana al-Hadid, who's this incredibly beautiful sculpture-making artist who's Syrian-born American, and it goes on like this.
Speaker 2:But really, where I saw the penny drop, as they say, was when I did the show called, but we Cannot See them. And I did that with Banna Kattan and Alaa Idris to survey the UAE's own avant-garde history. So we did an oral history, and that was when I realized there's this. I had seen that people didn't know the story of the UAE's art history, and one of the versions of the story was there were these five artists we call them the five. They did this, they did that and they're all great.
Speaker 2:But when I actually did the oral history, what I discovered was it wasn't just five, of course, there were five, because that was the name of the exhibition that named the group.
Speaker 2:But in fact that group had in it multiple people from multiple cultures, so a Sudanese guy, a Dutch guy, a couple Indian guys you know what I mean and some women the women often also get forgotten but also not only artists, also poets, musicians, actors, playwrights, etc.
Speaker 2:And so it was in that moment that I was like oh so every time we write, every time we do an exhibition according to a grouping, there are people that we're leaving out. And so then the then I began to think much in a much kind of broader, interconnecting way of like let's try to look at influences coming in from East and from South and from North, not only from West, because the five are almost always interpreted through a Western art history lens, in terms of Duchamp and Fluxus and so on. So I think that was a really critical moment of and that was what sparked my interest in. I already was like looking east and looking at the progressives in India as another moment where artists are sort of forming their own community in order to enable innovation. But now I always think like, oh right, there are artists coming from India who were part of Avant-Garde in the UAE and this means that there's no way you can study the region's art history without also studying the exchange across continents that this location makes possible.
Speaker 1:So that's a little bit again a long answer, but I think it really, really frames exactly kind of what we are discussing even throughout this entire season. Maya, honestly and I think that it's a perfect transition to what I really want to ask you, which is the role and importance of South Asian art, can you expand on it in the UAE ecosystem? I mean this eventually, this interest in this entire story led you to becoming an advisory board member of Ishada Art Foundation, which is an incredibly important position, but also a founding institution in this entire story. So can you please expand on this regarding South Asian art and its role within the ecosystem? On?
Speaker 2:this regarding South Asian art and its role within the ecosystem. Yeah, and I'll start by saying something that sounds a little contradictory. So one of the missions for the university galleries is not to curate by region, by ethnicity or by country, and I say that knowing full well that, if you look at our history, it looks like we have done that on several different occasions. What it is is to think about histories and perspectives that have been underrepresented but are rich with content and value, and one of those 2017, was the UAE's own art history, and one of those 2017, was the UAE's own art history. Currently, we have a show on that looks at the wider Gulf's contemporary practice today, and so, in a way, it's thinking regionally, but it's actually thinking about people who are here, who are from somewhere else, so that exchange is always implicit in how I frame a regionally defined show, and so, when it comes to South Asian art, I have the same kind of challenge. Well, what do we mean by South Asian? Do we mean diaspora and people living in the countries that we refer to as South Asian? Is there something South Asian inherent in the art? I think all of these are questions that I'm asking to make a point, which is that it's a problem, right, that that phrasing itself asks a question before you even realize it. And if you don't see the question in the phrasing, then the exhibitions can help you articulate those questions. The exhibitions can help you articulate those questions At a certain point.
Speaker 2:In a way, what Ishara's mission does, and what Smita and Sabi have managed to do, is to almost to allow us to see the work on its own terms, which is to say to acknowledge the cultural references in which it grew up as the art form, but also not to over-define it according to its cultural background. And this is the problem you often run into in kind of traditional Western museums is that when an artist from, let's say, let's say, an artist from India is presented, it's interpreted, it can often be interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of Indian culture, instead of just letting the art be what the art is. And so then it adds this kind of separating layer of cultural framing. Sometimes that's really necessary, other times not so much. And I think what the Ashara Art Foundation allows is for the work to speak on its own terms, because it's already given the frame nominally right, the minimal frame which is we focus on the art from South Asia and they don't over-define it. They might have somebody who's South Asian diaspora frame, which is we focus on the art from South Asia, and they don't over define it. They might have somebody who's South Asian diaspora, they, you know, they kind of let it, let that sort of shift and move as necessary and they don't limit it to only India, for example, which I think that was.
Speaker 2:You know, that could be a question like where do you draw that line, which I think that could be a question like where do you draw that line? And to let it be in a way its own provocation as a term. And then that way, then the art really, it sort of shakes off the weight of having to represent an entire culture, the weight of having to represent an entire culture. So having a space where that weight is removed, I think allows the art to sing and to have its own value and its own voice and not have to stand for the voices of all South Asians. And this, to me, is just extremely, extremely important, extremely, extremely important, at the same time as I know that the, the Ashara people are very careful also not to, you know, not to think of it in what we would sometimes call ghettoizing terms, where we're like you know, this is not Asian enough, you know what I mean Like there's not this sort of like evaluation beyond, just like we're interested in the art from these communities and this comes back to my point about community.
Speaker 2:What we're actually talking about are communities, not some kind of generic cultural set of traits, and so once I begin to look at their exhibitions as representations of artists and their voices within their larger community, then it becomes a much healthier exchange, and so when I think of our space in dialogue with theirs, it's a much easier exchange, also because we are together. Ishara and NYU Abu Dhabi are in a shared community, we're in a shared thinking space and we're thought partners. We're in a shared thinking space and we're thought partners, and so there's not a wall that's created by by the, the term South Asian, it's actually. It actually opens doors of exchange rather than narrowing it and I think this is a really hard to articulate term but something or concept, but something that's going to make or break our ability to think about art in a global context and I think you've articulated it perfectly and essentially the idea that we don't draw boundaries or place artists in boxes and right.
Speaker 1:That's essentially um truly the ethos ofara Art Foundation, as Smita even honestly articulated during her episode as well. My final question for you, maya, is what's next for NYU, abu Dhabi, the art galleries, and what's upcoming in your work?
Speaker 2:So, as the increase as Saadiyat Islands museums come online, we have the Zayed National Museum, which is a heritage and history museum, followed by the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as well as Team Lab and the Natural History Museum. As these come online, and as the Cultural Foundation has come back online, and as 421 and the MISA projects kick into gear, we have a really wonderful new chapter opening for us. So we're at our 10-year anniversary. We opened 10 years ago in November of 2014. And I'm really happy because what this means is that we can now really dig into the areas where I have found kind of the deepest audience engagement, but also the things getting a feel for what can we do that nobody else can, and I'll give you some examples. Yeah, so one of the things that we can do that is very sort of a characteristic university gallery or museum role in an ecosystem to play, which is to give emerging or mid-career artists like a major, substantial survey and monographic book publication. Right. So not just a catalog, but a true book that does a deep dive into their practice, and that often is something that can really take an artist's career to the next level. A lot of times, university shows generate the kind of knowledge production. You need to then be at the level at which major museums begin to. They begin to be the sort of thing that you would start to see in major museums, and so that's one of the roles that a university museum plays in ecosystems very often is, and a lot of times when you see a major museum doing a retrospective, it'll follow on the heels of projects like that being done by university museums and galleries. So part of our job is to take risks in addition to this kind of identifying really key talent and questions and giving it its first major platform talent and questions and giving it its first major platform.
Speaker 2:Another thing that we do is look at artistic practice on its most experimental outer edges, like what is happening in a particular art movement, in a particular art community, in a particular style, in a particular region, and sort of taking a look or a snapshot. So that's the current show we have on, which is like what are some of the most important or influential or thought-provoking things that we've seen in the GCC in the last five years? But then, you know, another example would be be the moon, which is not. You know, this is a Swiss artist who does these um, low tech, sound installations, and we did a major survey of his work with a new commission and a book, uh, back in twenties I don't even remember which year it was 16, 17, 18, 2018, I think and um, and that would be an example of somebody who's doing work that is not very commercially viable, right, like he can't sell his art that easily or he could, but it's not the kind of thing you just hang on your wall in your dining room but it's work that really deserves deeper study. And so our space is a space that allows artists to grow and flourish ideas that may not have a commercial value, but have an institutional and educational and thought-provoking kind of value. And then, finally, curatorial practice and training of students is something very specific to what we do.
Speaker 2:So one of the things I make it my business to be thinking always about what does a curator do? Why do we exist? How do we exist, but what models are there that haven't been fully explored? What are the problems of museum hierarchies in terms of audience versus curator? The curator is usually the voice of authority. How can we experiment with dispersing that authority and allowing exhibitions to be a space of dialogue instead of a space of hierarchy?
Speaker 2:And so really thinking about the exhibition space as a space of investigation and experimentation, in whatever form that takes. Major museums have a different remit from us. Commercial galleries have to sell art. Our job is to investigate and push forward the thinking in our field and that is consistent with the university's role and to help shape the future generations of thinkers and practitioners Not to shape them, but to make a space for them to grow while they're here, if that makes sense. So my hope is that the students we're training today and the curatorial assistants that we're training today will go on to lead museums, art movements, curatorial practices, major exhibitions in the future, here and abroad.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you so much, Maya. I think you've given us a lot to think about and perspectives, not only regarding curatorial practices, but also the interaction between, like you said, museums and universities. I really believe this episode will add so much value to the audience. I thank you so much for your time and hopefully we meet soon in Abu Dhabi perhaps, or Dubai, I would love it.
Speaker 2:I would love it. Thank you so much also for you know I think that I didn't say this clearly, but it's always on my mind which is one of the most challenging things, I think, for a growing ecosystem is the role that you play, which is somebody to help us tell the story of what we're doing, but also to question it, you know, and to go a little deeper and to prod and you know, see what's there and beyond the marketing. And I think that you know, even just interviewing people and bringing the stories together is really important because otherwise it disappears. So thank you so much for the work that you're doing.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening and make sure to follow at Ishara Art Foundation, as well as at NYUAD Art Gallery and, of course, at the Curation Pod, to ensure that you do not miss another episode. This season was incredible. There are four episodes total to the Ishara Art Foundation and Radical Contemporary season. Make sure to go back and listen to any of the ones that you've missed and I will see you all on the next one.