Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East at Saatchi Gallery

This is an exciting exhibition beautifully staged in the new Saatchi Gallery, Kings Road, Chelsea. The building was previously the headquarters of the Duke of York’s barracks designed in 1803 by John Sanders, a pupil of Sir John Soane, who built Dulwich Picture Gallery!
     It is a large exhibition, 86 works by 19 artists; most large-scale and hung to great effect in the beautifully proportioned rooms. It is amazing to enter and see a dozen or more works by one artist. There are paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations by artists come from across the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Algeria and Tunisia. They address the subjects of unending war, terrorism, social inequality, religious police and the denigration of women in Islamic societies. The work is strong which may explain why only eight of the artists actually live in the Middle East, and only two of the seven women.
     For me the most striking work was Ghost by Kadaer Attia. Approach the room and you see a mass of rounded shapes: from the front they become the shapes of women, their chadors made of tin foil; faceless, hollow shells, feather-light and easily disposable. A question of individual identity and exclusion in the face of fundamentalist religion – but perhaps also a comment on throw-away consumerism.
     Sadi Ghadirian’s Like Everyday Series uses photographs to comment on stereotypical jokes. Ordinary kitchen utensils are used for the face of shrouded women: a colander represents a woman who is all mouth; a grater, the abrasive mother-in-law; a cleaver looks like a one eyed hatchet face.
     Rokni Haerizadeh’s loosely painted scenes of everyday life – funerals, weddings, the beach – point up the hypocrisy of his culture. On the beach the men frolic lightly clad (and pot bellied), whilst the women stroll in full length coats, or provide food whilst dressed in burkhas.
     Dianna Al-Hadid builds fantastical sculptures from steel, plaster, wood, fibreglass and plastic. In her two-part sculpture Tower of Infinite Problems her abstract forms bristling with spikes and honeycombed with latticework lie side by side on the gallery floor, looking like two toppled towers – the Twin towers? The Tower of Babel? They are “a monument to human fallibility” which repeats and repeats.
     Halim Al-Karim’s Hidden War 2 presents photographic triptychs of half-seen faces which move in and out of focus – prisoners, victims, dolls, prisoner-goddesses.
     There’s so much in this show; a vast range of different styles, enormous canvases (some 4 x 2 m), whole room installations, bold, bravura, huge vitality. Go and see it.
Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East at the Saatchi Gallery runs until 6 May.