A thoughtful walk through Art Dubai

DUBAI: Anyone walking through the main entrance of the Madinat Jumeira conference center nowadays must run a gauntlet of thigh-high marsh grass. A miniature meadow of the stuff has been planted in the foyer, in a few dozen small flowerpots, and arranged in thick rows on either side of the twin doors.By Tuesday evening the day before the eighth edition of Art Dubai opened to the public several of the pots had already been knocked over and the grass trampled underfoot by the fairs patrons, who may not have realized they were walking though a piece of installation art.

That seems to have been the intention behind The Desired Path, a two-stage work by New York-based Lebanese artist Youmna Chlala.

The title The Desired Path is an architectural term, Chlala explained. Whenever theres a concrete footpath through a green space, you always see another one that pedestrians take across the grass. Its more-or-less parallel to the official pathway but less direct, and thats the one people want to take.

The works second stage is located a few hundred meters north of the first, beyond the far side of the Madinat Jumeira, at the base of a set of outdoor stairs leading to the Mina al-Salam hotel the venue of Art Dubai Modern and the fairs Global Art Forum.

Here, art buyers dont find pots of marsh grass, but strips of sod the sort of weed-free grass cultivated in nurseries, cut from the soil like a scalp from the skull and sold to impatient and wealthy homeowners that has been arranged into a square. If you raise one of the once-green strips and peer beneath, as the public is encouraged to do, you see the sod has been laid on a bed of sterile sand.

For me, Chlala said, this piece is all about time.

The most-obvious temporal element is the degradation of the plants over the course of Art Dubai from green to a shade of gray-beige. For the artist, the work is also meant to evoke sensory memory in the public recollected encounters with greenery that are accentuated by the pieces incongruity within the meticulously manicured space.

The two different types of flora used in The Desired Path juxtapose the way in which this patch of turf may once have looked (when it was still called Chicago Beach) with what it has become since being transformed into the upscale hotel district of Jumeirah.

There is also a performative aspect not simply the publics tramping through and over the grasses, but in their maintenance. The plants are being watered daily, with a spray bottle.

If The Desired Path has a weakness, its less in the work itself than its spatial deployment. The two stages are so far from each other that preoccupied art-market aficionados may have trouble keeping both in mind at once, or even noticing that they are both facets of the same artwork, rather than the detritus of some grounds-maintenance project at the hotel complex.

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A thoughtful walk through Art Dubai