What will the future look like?
While it’s common practice to read horoscopes, connect together astrology with prophecies heard by clairvoyants, the future has become a neurotic subject on a personal, cultural and social level. Also, Franco Bifo Berardi recently suggested the notion of ‘futurability’ as a way to remind us that “even within the darkness of our current crisis, a better world lies dormant.” Although planning an ideal future-like-scenario might sound like an oxymoron in unpredictable and unstable times, it must be said that the notion of future varies from one country to another. In the Gulf region, in a time where the much-awaited Dubai Expo2020 is mostly based on the idea of tomorrow’s sustainability and mobility, the word ‘future’ has become a mantra. Questions as “what’s next?” echo an overall inner anxiety to perform in innovative ways, asking to be newer than innovation itself.
For five years now of living in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia first, Dubai second, and a recent move to Kuwait), Claudio Cravero has been witnessing curating and art-making in the Gulf. Because we live in a Netflix-like-painted life, the article is being split into three episodes, rather than chapters, becoming a mini-series about art-making in the 21st century from a Gulf-based perspective.
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Cultural globalization has gone in tandem with the search of all-embracing narratives in museum exhibition-making. Furthermore, the rapid increase of biennales, art fairs, and festivals have also highlighted persistent gaps in the curatorial field, unmet needs and even the willingness of ‘decolonizing the curatorial’ in some of the non-Western museums seeking the ‘home-grown’ to reframe Western and Eastern epistemologies.
Before we can speak of curating in the 21st century as something other than what preceded it, it can also be worth to think of what makes art different at the present time. What makes art different in the 21st century is represented by the expanded field of possibilities, for instance cultural, political or geographical, featuring our ever-changing societies, namely the world in which we live and to which we are called to respond.
First, when it comes to the Middle East, and more specifically the Gulf Region, it is to be stressed how curating is a very recent job. Curation is as young as contemporary art as a discipline itself along with the few museums that have inaugurated over the last decade. However, while contemporary art is considered a pretty new phenomenon if we look at a broader global scene, it has become part of the political agenda of governmental institutions.
1. TODAY IS TOMORROW'S YESTERDAY
While the past is being investigated broadly and aligned with the central historical hierarchies, museums and institutions alike are projected toward the future. For instance, besides Dubai Expo2020 foreshadowing tomorrow’s opportunities and mobility in a sustainable way, it is not a case that the city will have its own Museum of the Future soon. Also, some years ago, in 2016, the global forum at Art Dubai, the leading art fair of the Region, was titled “The Future was”. It investigated in retrospect the expectations the city set in the 1970s and how it has actually developed.
However, this forward-looking standpoint is not new for the Gulf. Its historical roots date back both to the 1940s and late 1960s, when the Trucial States were not yet unified as the UAE we know today—they only got unified in 1971. The discovery of oil reservoirs in the UAE territory came into being very late (in 1966) compared to other countries like Saudi Arabia, which discovered oil in 1938.
Sheik Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai before the unification of the seven emirates, understood the importance of investing in the future of the city for the prosperity of the generations to come in a time where oil production would no longer be sustainable for the economy (which is now being predicted to happen late 2030). His famous quotation reads:
“My grandfather rode a camel; my father rode a camel; I drive a Mercedes; my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, too; but, his son may ride a camel anew.”
Sheik Rashid then worked to improve the economy of Dubai by building infrastructures (ports, tunnels, the Trade Center, and so forth) to avoid any possible dystopian scenarios for its posterity.
In the present time, with these premises, it seems that the constant question is “What’s next?”. There is somehow an obsession for future-like scenarios pervading several fields, not just the arts. For example, we could think of Netflix and its dystopian TV series “Black Mirror”, which shows the use of technology at some point in a future time. That being said, this compulsive mania about tomorrow inevitably affects our storytelling as curators. In fact, the more we think about the future, the more we lose sight of the present, which is supposed to be the framework that contemporary art deals with. By being trapped in this futuristic timeframe, one can also wonder what we will be able to remember in 2030 about 2019. Most likely, we will remember ourselves as people who thought of our future societies as throwbacks. Furthermore, not being in the present also involves our feelings, because if we think of our past, we live in regret, while when we project ourselves in the future, we experience anxiety. Eventually, the constant pressure to discover ‘newer newness’ in our work pushes us down into the vicious cycle of FOMO, the fear of missing out.
