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Community Collaborations: art and design as a public service

By Atteqa Ali

Is art and design about serving the public? Do artists and designers have to consider what the public wants or needs? Many artists and designers around the world have taken the call to provide a public service—to identify local civic needs and address them through an outcome. In the United Arab Emirates, a community-based art and design project aimed to take local histories and traditions and bring them into the global twenty-first century.  The initial aim of the project was to trace the global patterns of community formation in the UAE. Established by Arab-Persian merchants, Al Fahidi is the oldest surviving residential neighborhood in the nation and it served as the locus of a group research project. Students and professional artists undertook research to look into the history of the community in Al Fahidi—one that ties together the UAE and the extended MENA region, and beyond. Through the results of these findings and discussions, a practical outcome made an intervention in the neighborhood that tried to activate it in a unique and positive way. It took the heritage of this community to create something innovative -- a display that brought a house back to life with the voices, photographs, and ghostlike visions of prior residents. Organized for the Sikka Art Fair, the exhibition reached more than a thousand visitors.

As the research project continued, it shifted to investigating and analyzing the impact of artist collectives and grassroots arts organizations in nurturing and forming communities in areas where they exist or to which they are connected. I considered groups from across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. I also researched the projects of individual artists who have sought methods to address and reach out to larger networks of people.

http://truckartprojects.org/community-collaborations/

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Researcher Bio

Atteqa Ali is Assistant Dean of Students and Associate Professor of Art History and Curatorial Practices at Zayed University in Dubai. She has written the manuscript Collaborative Art Praxes and Contemporary Art Experiments in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Play: Subversion in Contemporary Pakistani Art and Its Diaspora is under press with Oxford University Press. She has organized several exhibitions including a project at Twelve Gates Gallery in Philadelphia entitled “Back to the Future: History and Contemporary Art in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia” that considered the work of artists utilizing historical references to talk about current social and political events.