ArtDayME: These days, the exhibition "Parallel Histories: Works from the collection of Barjeel Art Foundation" is being held at the Sharjah Art Museum.

Drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, artworks in the exhibition reflect the manifold ways in which artists in the Arab world have responded to socio-political events and the human condition across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

While the multiple histories and experiences encapsulated by works on display were often separated by geography, political climate, national borders, personal circumstance, and various conditions of life, they—like parallels—ran alongside one another, replacing each other with time, and forming a kaleidoscopic fabric of both synchronous and changing events. 

In offering a broad look at the region’s highly varied artistic milieu, this exhibition brings together a plurality of art schools, movements, and figures whose histories have, and continue to coexist side by side. It also calls attention to subjects that remain pertinent for artists in the present-day, mirroring concerns of their peers in the early to mid-twentieth century, including reinterpretations of regional craft, questions of identity, experiences of migrant communities, labour concerns, and changing political structures. In presenting a multiplicity of voices and praxis that emerged from the region and its diasporas in a shared space, the display offers an opportunity to explore the heterogeneity of regional art, and invites visitors to (re)consider the reading of the Arab world’s past and present.

About Barjeel Art Foundation

Barjeel Art Foundation is an independent, UAE-based initiative established to manage, preserve and exhibit an extensive collection of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art. The foundation’s guiding principle is to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent, publicly accessible art collection in the UAE. Part of this objective involves developing a public platform to foster critical dialogue around contemporary art practices with a focus on artists with Arab heritage internationally.

The foundation strives to create an open-ended enquiry that responds to and conveys the nuances inherent to Arab histories beyond borders of culture and geography. By hosting in-house exhibitions, lending artwork to international forums, producing print and online publications, and fashioning interactive public programmes, the foundation strives to serve as an informative resource for contemporary art by Arab artists both locally and on the global stage. In addition to building an informative database of artists, the foundation is seeking to develop an educational programme that both understands and involves the local community. By establishing partnerships with arts and cultural institutions internationally, the foundation looks to create opportunities to encourage public awareness of the importance of art to the community.

In 2018, Barjeel signed a contract with the Sharjah Museums Authority to open a long-term exhibition at the Sharjah Art Museum, which features a selection of key modernist paintings, sculptures and mixed media artworks from the Barjeel Art Foundation collection.

Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, an Emirati columnist, researcher and scholar is founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation.