During Art Dubai's curators' exchange session, Emiliano Valdes, the curator of the fair's Bawwaba section referred to a widely misinterpreted Mahatma Gandhi quote: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” The employment of this quote to produce a willingness to transform by placing the onus onto oneself is tweaked to examine our positions and actions and the impact it has on our planet. Valdes notes, “Every action is political” whilst reminding us how artists must operate on two levels—while thinking about the world they must also introspect on our relationship with ourselves. Situated in Hall A instead of its usual section, this is conceptually the strongest edition of the segment so far. However, one can't ignore the wide presence of Indian artists and galleries to the detriment of its 'Global South' claim.

Having said that Valdes succeeds in creating a visual, conceptual and emotional conversation among the artists that do not seem stretched and remain authentic to each one’s context. In this, it navigates heartbreak, humour, loss and hope with disarming honesty. For example, exhibiting artists from Delhi-based galleries, like Manjot Kaur at Latitude 28, Laxmipriya Panigrahi at Anant Art Gallery and Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai at Blueprint 12, all use the form of the garden, foliage and forests to present three starkly different conditions through the acts of remembering, imagining and in some sense reclaiming.

Kaur's series Ecosystems are Love Stories (2023-2024) used Indian miniature traditions to depict women in relationships of love and care with nature. She explains, "I counter-narrate existing mythological motifs and attributes that allow opportunities for mythic re-imagination to create worlds where women, flora and fauna thrive responding to ecological grief and loneliness. Threaded through these stories are revelations of sexuality, fecundity and kinship to rethink the meaning of love, care and motherhood.”

On the other hand, Ahmadzai's Bagh-e Zanana series eponymously titled after a garden reserved exclusively for women, testifies to the loss of home and a city and emerges from her memories of walks in the gardens of Kabul. Now based in Germany (after having lived in Afghanistan and India), she distils memories into motifs. Panigrahi, who hails from the lush but ecologically fragile ecosystems of Odisha, summons real and imagined flora and fauna in a world where only nature exists. Panigrahi and Kaur, in that sense, are closer and present a femme gaze towards the world and the ensuing climate crisis.

Another thread that runs through the segment is the body, freedom and the act of making as a ritual and mode of healing. In these inquiries, inherited knowledge collides with new mythologies as in the works of the Mozambican ceramicist Reinata Sadimba, Mayan Tz’utujil artist Manuel Chavajay and Indian artist Debashish Paul. Presented by Perve Gallery, Galería Extra and Emami Art respectively, the artists use the ritual to connect with soil and landscape but also heal from violence. Sadimba was actively involved in the armed struggle and liberation movement that led to the Mueda Massacre by the Portuguese. Post-independence in 1975, Sadimba’s calling came to her in a dream and she found purpose in figurative sculpture, reads the gallery note.

In the next booth, Paul contemplates forms of belonging as a queer person in the largely heteronormative Indian society. Delicate, hand-stitched costumes and masks, invoke celestial and otherworldly avatars that find home in nature. Chavajay navigates the violence his family endured during the armed conflict. His work emerges from the landscape of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. For example, in the series K’o q’iij ne t’i’lto’ ja juyu’ t’aq’aaj which translates to “There are days when the mountains and volcanoes come closer,” he collects waste from the San Pedro la Laguna. The residue from engines including petroleum byproducts and oil is like the “blood of Mother Nature, whose entrails are violently opened by human greed and ambition” reads the gallery note. Chavajay, like Sadimba, Paul and Ahmadzai employs practice and making as a mode of healing and recuperating from loss. These practices extend and further speak to the works of Abul Hisham at Secci Gallery, in how they think about dispossession emerging from desire, power and death. Hisham’s role as an observer of the Keralan society he inhabits makes apparent the layers of marginalisation and violence that occur through systems of oppression including caste, class and religion.

Artist Mirna Bamieh at Nika Project Space is also a chef who examines the modalities of disappearance and preservation of Palestinian histories and cultural legacies. With the Palestine Hosting Society, which she founded in 2017, she has hosted and staged a diversity of gatherings that foreground endangered recipes and eating rituals. In Bawwaba, Bamieh presents Sour Things: The Kitchen which emerges from her research around fermentation “as a process and a tool for reflection”. A kitchen counter style installation with ceramics and pickled jars is accompanied by video interventions and sound by Issac Sullivan is used to contemplate “ingestion/digestion, looking at human and non-human processes of control and overflow. The body expands into a kitchen, in which revealing and confessing is staged over notions of eating, preservation, transformation and decay” reads the artist's text.

Like Ahmadzai, Bamieh also remains displaced. For the latter, each iteration of the series (the one at Bawwaba being the second after Sharjah Biennale 15) will stand as a fragment of home. This denial of home, to be nourished and be at rest is countered with a refusal to heal—to hold onto memories, practices and flavours—and use preservation as a mode of resistance. Valdes’ Sanación / Healing does not claim to offer solutions or believe that art may change or resolve the world, it instead invests in producing conversations and staging platforms of care to gather and maybe heal.

STIR is a Media Partner with Art Dubai 2024, taking place at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, from March 1-3. Click here to read STIR's exclusive coverage of the 17^th edition.