Accompanying Abdullah Al Saadi's eponymous solo exhibition at the National Pavilion UAE at the 60th International Venice Biennale, this publication invites an immersion into the artist's singularly subjective universe, offering reflection and meditation rather than explanation or analysis.
Abdullah Al Saadi's poetic, expansive, and complex practice dwells outside the Western canons of contemporary art. Rather than attempt to box it within categories and labels, we grant the catalog's readers the privileged possibility of witnessing and following the journeys.
Al Saadi is a wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, decipherer, alchemist, memory carrier, and storyteller. At the heart of the publication is the first comprehensive and consequential chronicle of eight journeys in the wilderness, the beings and objects that accompanied him, and the sensate record of his experience. Each journey's chronicle becomes manifest in formally and materially distinct ways, which the artist packs and stores differently each.
In his work, the landscapes are manifested in maps like drawings; they are as many representations of a place as they are inscriptions of time because these landscapes are at once elusive and timeless. Al Saadi's travel companions are animals (a donkey, a bird, a chicken, a dog), they appear in these chronicles to form a lively and protective bestiary. These, as other markings, signs, and codes in the chronicles, are in a vivid, playful, and potent conversation with the rich tradition of medieval Arab travel literature that intersected between geographical exploration, poetry, and fantastical literature. Al Saadi's practice resonates powerfully with the legacy of classical Arab poets, whose wanderings in the natural expanses of the Arab Peninsula were often incarnated in a poem.
Emirati artist Abdullah Al Saadi (born 1967 in Khorfakkan) is, with Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Hassan Sharif, Hussain Sharif, and Mohammed Kazem, one of the "Pioneer Five" conceptual artists, who, in the 1980s, bolstered the contemporary art scene in the UAE and influenced a generation of artists in the region. Abdullah Al Saadi's work ranges from painting, drawing and the creation of lengthy artists' notebooks to the collection and systematic categorisation of found objects and the invention of new alphabets. A great affinity with nature and rural life informs his practice, which explores the changing environment as well as personal and cultural history.
