COLLECTION: Getting Over the Color Green

March 14th to March 22nd, 2023

Warehouse 46, Alserkal Avenue

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Getting Over the Color Green, a group exhibition curated by Athoub AlBusaily and Gaith Abdulla, is the outcome of Engage101’s second Peer Review Program. Featuring the works of Adele Bea Cipste, Ana Escobar Saavedra, Fatma Al Ali, Hala El Abora, Sara Farha, Sarra Elomrani, and the artist collective of Ruba Al-Sweel, Rojda Yavuz & Shamiran Istifan.

The color green informs our agendas of a perfect landscape, aesthetics, taste, dreams, spiritual connotations of reward, visions of gardens, and divinely tended landscapes. Getting Over the Color Green meant many things during the process of making this exhibition. The underlying thread was aiming for a better awareness of the environment, and understanding it not as a place but a concept, in an attempt to decolonize the intrenched structures of thought associated with it. To dismantle ideas linked to arid landscapes, colonial associations of the desert environment, and why we place green atop our hierarchical view of nature.

The artworks in this exhibition discuss themes of money madness, water’s relationship to civilization, senseless urban sprawl, violent legacies of colonial bureaucracies, obsession with ownership and possession, and our judgment of the value of objects and their transaction to the status of artifacts. 

Among the approaches taken by this exhibition’s artists, were those who engaged in meditative and explorative walks through environments, in attempts to question acts of extraction and what is ‘natural’. Adele Bea Cipste, Hala Al Abora, and Ana Escobar Saavedra took the direction of leaving their studio spaces and embarking on creative processes that involved walking through different environments, re-imagining them, while critically engaging with the acts of gathering and foraging for information and evidence. The results of such a process, are not physical, but how artists that come back to the studio bring intangible traces of ecology, geology, and topology with them. 

Satirical gestures reflecting on absurd contemporary social conditions were a means of meditating on ‘green’ as the cultural supremacy of greed and hypercapitalism. As an artist collective, Ruba Al-Sweel, Rojda Yavuz, and Shamiran Istifan played on online aesthetics of wishful thinking and spirituality in service of material prosperity and ‘attracting’ wealth; delving into “the dark heart of contemporary society and ambitions of growth under capitalism.“

Absurdity in urban planning, its histories tied to systems of inequality, and the algorithms of its future are the foundations of Sara Farha’s abstract sculptural series. Sarra Elomrani’s ceramic sculptures are an ode to water and their role in orchestrating human activity and settlements. Research into colonial archives and its often laughable language led Fatma Al Ali to discover the comical story of the British replacing local cultivation of purple carrots with their ‘superior’ orange carrots; a view into the role of so-called protection and what sacrifices come from that’. 

The process of exhibition making took account of the many exhibitions in the UAE and wider Gulf that have touched on subjects of environment and nature in the region. An overwhelming amount of green existed in these showcases and perceptions of the future seemed largely uncritical in accepting green scapes as an ultimate utopian ideal. Ironically, as we stressed ways of seeing beauty beyond green in desert environments during discussions with the participating artists, the UAE’s deserts witnessed historic greening after a period of uncharacteristically heavy rain. Dunes of sand were suddenly completely covered in green, and the deserts in those few days became meadows. We were deep into the analytical mindset of overcoming green supremacy in our understanding of natural value, but the magic of seeing green deserts was undeniable. Getting over the color green isn’t denying green or devaluing it, but understanding ‘environment’ without the inherited dichotomies of arid to lush and wasteland to a paradise. 

Although the desert environment is the exhibition’s protagonist, there is no sustainability agenda, none of the cliches that a show about environmentalism would be based on. The core of our agenda here was to break away from current modes of thought on what is natural, what is good, and what is valuable.