United Arab Emirates

Artist Abdullah Al Saadi is a wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, decipherer, alchemist, memory carrier, and storyteller. For the UAE Pavilion, his solo exhibition features eight artworks that were produced on his journeys in the wilderness and proposes to look at his creative process in relation to the practices of Arab poets centuries ago. During his journeys, Al Saadi starts to draw, paint or write once he feels immersed in nature. Similarly, classical Arab poets described this immersion as the process leading up to the composition of their poems.
For over forty years, Al Saadi has been creating singularly subjective narratives. Through a process of assiduous archiving, he keeps his maps, stones, scrolls, and drawings in tin boxes of various shapes and sizes. In turn, they are stored in big metal chests like treasure boxes, numbered, dated, and coded, as if he is creating and preserving a collective memory for the future. Visitors are invited to experience the artist’s world, in a performative re-enactment of his studio rituals of manifestation and disappearance, of remembrance and forgetting.