Aidan Salakhova: eastern Europe meets the Middle East in Dubai

Associated media

John Varoli explains how a Russian feminist artist bridges a cultural gap

During the past several years, Dubai has raced ahead of other Middle Eastern cities to take the title of contemporary art and culture capital of the Islamic world. If an artist or gallery wants to make it big in the Middle East, then Dubai is the place to be. The city’s flagship art event is Art Dubai, a contemporary art fair held every March since 2007 that attracts major galleries and collectors. In addition, the city’s private galleries are well funded, growing in number, and staffed by experienced experts.

Given its large and growing Muslim population, Russia is in some sense a part of the Islamic world. But Russia’s contemporary art scene prefers to go West. Very few have ventured into the Middle East. One Russian artist, however, has long had a burning passion to be a part of Dubai’s vibrant art scene.

In October, Aidan Salakhova became the first major Russian artist to stage a solo exhibition in a leading Dubai gallery.  ‘Out of Body’, her first-ever exhibition in the Middle East, opened on 7 October at Cuadro Gallery in Dubai’s financial centre. As her first name indicates, Aidan Salakhovais not typically Russian. Though born and raised in Moscow, her parents are Azerbajani, which certainly offers a clue to why she is able to understand and appeal to the Middle East audience.

The exhibition of 25 artworks is a testament to her range of skills and vision; she executes her sculptures as exquisitely as her drawings and paintings. Her work combines Islamic with Western feminist influences, mirroring her Azerbaijani background and Eastern European upbringing.

Through her art, Salakhovaexamines feminine identity in an Islamic context, with missing elements carrying as much weight as those that are visualized. Feminine figures are delicately portrayed, with the male presence noticeably absent. At times, the female form is alluded to, but it is seen only in the folds of drapery rather than in a traditional figurative manifestation.

Known for challenging portrayals of veiled female figures and references to religious and traditional symbolism that deconstructs the desires of the patriarchal order, Salakhova explores the complex and enigmatic identity of women today. The veil, which has signified the religious and social identity of women in different cultures around the globe since Antiquity, is a leading metaphor in Salakhova's art. She has said of her work:

By depicting the veil as a stereotype of Orientalism, I address political, social, psychological and spiritual dimensions in both the Islamic and Christian Orthodox worlds. I use an archaic poetic visual language that relates to Islamic miniatures and Byzantine icons and challenges the viewer through the covered or uncovered women.

She added:

I invite the viewer to analyse and solve the codes of the patriarchal subconscious and neurosis. These codes are astonishingly similar in all cultures from the past to the present.

Salakhova’s newest artworks are brilliantly provocative, yet subtle, often employing monotone or gold backgrounds that reference mediaeval paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and early mosaics. Highlights from the exhibition include contrasting white marble and polished granite sculptures weighing close to a metric ton. Some of these intricate works took up to three years to produce on site in Carrara, Italy.

Bashar Al Shroogi, director of Cuadro Gallery, comments:

Gender issues, particularly from an Islamic perspective, are common in art from the Islamic world. And yet, the mastery with which Aidan presents this theme so subtly and without fanfare, is powerful. This is an exhibition that inspires awe.

Known to friends and the adoring public simply as ‘Aidan’, Salakhova is no stranger to Dubai. Her previous visits there, however, have been as owner of Aidan Gallery in Moscow, which was a regular participant at every edition of Art Dubai. In May 2012, however, she closed the gallery to focus entirely on her work as an artist. In September 2012, Aidan Studio officially opened in Moscow in order to allow Salakhova and her students to focus on artistic, educational and experimental creative projects. The studio’s main goal is ‘to search for a new artistic language, to hold exhibitions, as well as multimedia and educational experiments that are not possible in the framework of a traditional commercial gallery’.

Born in Moscow during the last days of the atheistic Soviet Union, Salakhova came of age in the early 1990s when there was a rebirth in traditional and historical sentiment among Christians and Muslims following the collapse of the communist empire. And this explains why she often takes on themes that show her decades-long fascination with the power of religion in society today.

Salakhova is recognized as one of the four pillars of the post-Soviet contemporary art scene in Russia. In 1989, she opened the first art gallery in Russia, and helped to promote the careers of many important Moscow artists. At the same time, she still managed to forge a successful career as an artist, and today her works can be found in many private and state collections, including the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation (Moscow), and the Boghossian Foundation (Belgium).

The current exhibition at Cuadro continues a theme first shown to the international public in 2011 at the Azerbaijan Pavilion during the 54th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. These artworks quickly became internationally famous after the Azerbaijan government demanded their removal on the eve of the Biennale’s opening in late May 2011. While the circumstances of that act of censorship are not fully clear, sources close to the exhibition said that the secular government of Azerbaijan was not happy with images and statues of Islamic women in hijab.

The current exhibition in Dubai is giving new audiences a chance to see Aidan Salakhova’s work for themselves.