Dubai Gardens / Sharjah Biennial 13

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Detail from Dubai Gardens, Sharjah Biennial 13, with Hind Mezaina, courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation
Detail from Dubai Gardens, Sharjah Biennial 13, with Hind Mezaina, courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

 

As part of Sharjah Biennial 13, I worked with artist and photographer Hind Mezaina on a collaborative piece about the cultivation of green in the city of Dubai. Hind’s cyanotype prints explored a catalogue of flora that exists throughout the city. My textual vignettes, selected from my gathered archive on the city’s modern history, examine how foliage was a powerful tool in creating Dubai’s modern environments.

The collaborative piece has been purchased by the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Here is a sample from the fourteen vignettes:

XIII.

Dubai’s official gardener Mr Saari worked with dramatic perspectives. New, straight and unfettered tarmac roadways that raced toward a vanishing point. His canvases were horizontal: median strips, splinter islands, roundabouts, curbsides and highway shoulders. Green glistened in the mirage of water and steam that heat makes out of asphalt.

Green was planted to follow the lines of new development. One of the first roadways to be greenscaped by Mr Saari was that leading to Port Rashid from an inland quarry. Only the truck drivers transporting the rock to the port and then leaving to fetch more ever experienced the green. In this case, green was less for the driving pleasure than for the assertion that modern infrastructure would bear fruit.