While I could have run around earlier in my five-night trip to Abu Dhabi, I wanted to give my body a bit more time to rest between show install and opening before poking around. The day after the show opened, aside from early morning work that a journalist usually does, I was free until 5:15pm. So I went to the grand mosque.
I was told to visit the war memorial across the street (not a kind of street that you can cross safely but it is close enough to see from afar, which for me in this heat was enough).
You can only visit if you are appropriately covered. Fortunately I was prepared but it was a pashmina so a bit hot. It was doubling as my airplane warmth + once I arrive back home it will be very cold and I won't have a winter coat. But of course when I arrived back home it was in the 50s.
I was pretty underwhelmed here because it felt just.....big. I didn't feel any deep sense of spiritual center. If anything, it felt like everything was intentionally made so big to win things like the Guinness world record for the largest rug. All I could think of seeing so much white was: how many people does it take to CLEAN this place? And how little do they get paid?
After leaving the main complex, I felt like this was the more appropriate signaling of what this place is: another center of global capitalism. I've never seen more Tim Hortons than in this emirate.
My next visit was to Qasr Al Watan, the presidential palace where state dinners and meetings happen (not where people live).
Again, the scale was extremely grandiose. But a bit more craftsmanship and also (though fairly hidden from the main exhibits and public areas, in a weird black geometric enclosure) a bit more info about the making of it, elements that include mosaic, stained glass, marble, etc.
There is a photo op where you can stand in line to go into the gold structure.
The library, which you can't really access, another photo op.
If I hadn't wandered into the area where they explained some of the architectural elements, I would not have noticed that the marble was all cut in a way so that the veins could mirror each other. So much work! I did take a break in the cafe for a lovely quinoa tabbouleh, when I could finally stomach a lunch. It went Day 1: arrive at noon, eat pizza. Day 2: bfast and nothing else all day. Day 3: bfast and a Korean lunch I couldn't finish. Day 4: late afternooon dish! Day 5: overeat massively but in style. Day 6: already on the plane home.
I got back to the hotel with enough time to lay down. After fighting the urge to sleep through it, I walked back to KCC to teach my joomchi workshop. I had been warned that we had so many registrations that we needed to move from a classroom to the library.
Everyone had a great time, and the show branded bags came in handy for people to take their hanji home.
What amazed me is that when I arrived on Monday, the hotel cafe did not look like this at all. Over a few days, they did speedy construction to create an entire gingerbread cafe!!! Also, xmas tress went up all over the place along with lights and decoration. So fast.
My last day, Friday, was the only free day I had and while I really wanted to see the nighttime light shows all over the city (but not the part I was staying in), I only had the energy for the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
This is an Egyptian mummy bandage with an extract from the Book of the Dead, c. 300 BCE. It looks like someone just drew it!
The museum is so poorly laid out that I missed the entire rest of the permanent exhibitions and wandered to the temporary ones. This was from the Cartier show, which was very dark so it was hard to see but this is a necklace from Egypt (20th century). The point of the show was to demonstrate how deeply Cartier was influenced by Islamic art.
The other temporary exhibit was about the texts behind the three Abrahamic religions. I worried I would be bored but there was a TON to see. Including Dead Sea scroll bits!
And Book of the Dead on papyrus (Egypt, 1096–545 BCE).
At the end of the show was a contemporary commission called
The Unseen, by Muhannad Shono. It's thread, light, video, and sound in a dark room.
Parts of the book show were a bit over the top, where they installed mirrors to make it seem like endless books. Well before this gallery, I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of books.
I loved the ways that the text becomes the image.
This print was mind-boggling, where Yakov ben Abraham Zaddik, a Portuguese Jew, depicted all of the events of the Bible. What??? It's four sheets, printed intaglio in the Netherlands in 1621.
Here is one detail of so so so many more.
and another dyed one, this time with indigo.
An Ottoman Empire (1744) collection of prayers in both Arabic and Turkish.
It was remarkable how the dome creates adequate shade so that you are not hot outside.
By this point, I really needed to sit and eat. I decided that for my final day I would splurge.
Dim sum (including duck gyoza! I had just been complaining over turkey day that I'd prefer duck).
A lovely pho. Soup and noodles are always comfort food for me.
I even had tea afterwards, and then got up to wander a bit more. There was some contemporary art in the outdoor areas, but after seeing people leave a certain gallery that looked like I had missed, a guard finally confirmed that I had indeed missed almost 10 galleries. So I started all over in the permanent collection (which seems mostly stuff from the actual Louvre and other major French collections).
I was so happy to meet this Korean guy (1400–1500, gilded wood), a reliquary that holds prayers and objects.
Was not expecting this photo from Japan, colored very weirdly, of women boarding handmade paper!
And truly, this was the LAST guy I thought I'd meet here.
This was in the cartography gallery, a stick map from the Marshall Islands (c. 1900). "Rods represent the navigation routes, while the shells attached to the ends of the rods indicate the positions of the islands. These maps were never carried on board but read on land by navigators before the voyage at sea."
The coral bits! After my initial disappointment the previous day about not being able to see any "old stuff," I got my fill here (because the French were such ardent imperialists). I am back home now, recovering, and glad to be on this side of the show!
Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque
Qasr Al Watan
Louvre Abu Dhabi
No comments:
Post a Comment