Sultan Saud Al Qasimi: I dream of creating a private museum for the Barjeel art collection



Greetings to you and our viewers wherever you are in this special episode of the culture program. I have a greeting for you from the city of Shurooq, where you are sitting watching on the iPhone. Today we will get to know the “Generation of Arts” group at the Sharjah Art Museum with Sultan Saudiya, the fiancé of the series Saud Al-Qasimi. Welcome, emphasizing the significance of the first microphones in which you spoke in your city of Shurooq, and I chose to meet here in front of the Sharjah Art Museum. The museum is located in the area where we are now, a historically significant area with houses dating back over a hundred years. This is the area where many museums are located, including the Islamic Museum, the Arabic Calligraphy Museum, the Clock Museum, and also the Arts Museum, which was established in 1995 and the building was inaugurated in 1997. It is the oldest museum in the area for modern art. The visual artist aims to reach you through the phone in the year 1998 or 1999. Now, our art collection has become the most important one. There are collections available in two towers in the Sharjah Art Museum. It includes collections that have been or will be presented by artists from the Arab region, modern and contemporary art. We are talking about the transfer of this collection to the Sharjah Art Museum. The museum is one of the oldest in the area. A significant event was the first transfer of the collection in 2018. They give us one of the four main objectives of the museum, meaning that they welcome the government's efforts and emails about the museum. The museum is considered a relatively large space, 750 square meters, and we entered our artworks permanently or for a long time in 2018. The museum is very interested in achieving equality between works of female and male artists. Why, in fact, the challenge is to personally view the artist. We have heard many times that there are no important female artists in the Arab world. Therefore, the challenge is to visit any museum in Sharjah, where you can see the works of twenty female artists and others. Unfortunately, the Arab world adopted this incorrect idea from the West and repeated it in many museums in the region, resulting in an unequal presentation from a gender perspective. For artists from the Arab world, nowadays it is necessary to have a work that is preferable to be created and preferably from before the 1950s. This is the main standard that tries to restore balance. In the first ten years of the suffocation, so that it was close to what was proposed in the market and the place of the disc, the market was ninety percent with the works of men, who were like dragons' eyes, meaning. I don’t want to mean anything by important male artists, but the works of female artists took a challenging turn and managed to rebalance the group creatively. The works of female artists from the Arab region have many names that we will get to know shortly, but also the state or nationality of the artists are important. There is a great interest in artists from countries that I worked a lot on the map of the art scene in the Arab world such as Yemen and Libya. This is evidenced by the work that there is a presence of artists from Arab countries that are not well-known because they are very conservative in their countries. This was not the case in the Gulf countries, for example, as they were unable to enter the market. Correctly, the most important museums do not depend on them, especially in recent times. In Yemen and Libya, which are countries with a very ancient civilization, the focus has been able to obtain several artistic works by artists who have passed away to be on display. This work is a living example of this, by the work of the Yemeni artist Hakim Al-Haq. Speaking of this Sultan's uncle, Hakim, the most important for symbolic history to the Arab or happy Yemen, is a graduation project for the artist Hakim Al-Aqla when he was studying at the Sura Academy in Syria in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This work through four slides, the viewer can understand or learn the story of Yemen through us if a political action is taken, Sultan's political action. What are the criteria that matter to you in choosing new paintings to enter the Bridal Group? We are talking about the importance of the work for you. This is a painting by the Syrian artist Saeed Tameem, who was the education and important artist as he studied in Iraq, Syria, and Misev, and other parts of the Arab world. He was also a prominent artist, supporter of Arab unity between Syria and Nasser in the 1950s, and in this painting, he reflects the importance of President Jamal Abdel Nasser. He was a man of peace initiatives, but a man of strength, literally making a difference. Can I act? Can we see peoples of the world celebrating it, such as in Africa or South America? These represent countries of non-alignment, which he was part of creating, drawing from the works of art to the works of the butter, there are works that take us to work that makes you feel proud as an artist, or an artist unfortunately who traveled from one of. The most important artworks we have, including the leading Palestinian artist Ashraf al-Saadi, with a small number of her large and important paintings. She was born in 1905 in Jerusalem and studied under the Palestinian artist Gaban Kahlil and placed paintings here in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s of this Palestinian and individuals, Palestinian faces and flags. Unfortunately, after the disaster of Damascus and not writing there, she died there in 1988. This program of painting, after your permission, is a very rare program that carries great responsibility on us to preserve and secure it. She is a Palestinian artist, meaning the opposite of the Palestinian identity and history. I consider it one of the most important pieces that I killed in the search for the most recent works in the Arab world. What are the difficulties and challenges facing you in the search for rare artworks? The truth is that there is a lot of luck in old books from the fifties and sixties for this asset and the second is that there is a big migration, as the Arab world became in the mid-twentieth century, and many of the works went to Europe or North America, meaning that they were forgotten in video or offline. I don’t want it to mean that a world where all important works are left behind countries like Palestine, Qatar, Syria, Jordan, and others. I love that many of the works remain in these countries.



Podcast URL: External link

Duration: 0:12:27

Language: Arabic

Topics: Art Preserving Arab Art Collecting Rare Arab Art

Author: فرانس 24 / FRANCE 24

Speech density: HIGH