Hassan Sharif

Abstract

Hassan Sharif, a leading Emirati conceptual artist, pioneered new visual languages and critical societal debates over a 40-year career. He worked across mediums, creating monumental, assembled objects from everyday items, semi-system drawings based on chance and logic, and performances. His practice, including his Books and Boxes (series) and paintings, defined an original conceptual language in the UAE while engaging with international art histories. Sharif was a pivotal educator, mentor, writer, and translator. He co-founded the Emirates Fine Arts Society and established the arts periodical Al Tashkeel, fostering critical discourse. His semi-systems methodology, exemplified in works like White Files, involved repetition and systematic processes, deconstructing social practices and art histories. Using found materials, his iconic Objects series playfully critiqued consumerism and art production. Sharif's performances and writings bridged local and global art contexts, profoundly shaping the UAE's artistic landscape and advocating for art's transformative power.

Biography

Hassan Sharif was the foremost Emirati conceptual artist of the late 20th century. He asserted the artist's role while writing new visual languages and disseminating critical debates on society's political, economic, and cultural fabric. Sharif has worked across mediums for more than forty years. He assembled collections of made or found everyday objects into monumental piles placed on the floor or hung from the wall, executed semi-system drawings experimenting with chance and logic, actions or performances of systematic body movements; completed a series titled Books and Boxes, produced numerous paintings and outdoor sculptures. Sharif defined an original conceptual language in the United Arab Emirates while speaking to international art histories and multifaceted readings of contemporaneity. His pedagogical role as a teacher, mentor, writer, and translator of texts on art, culture, and politics informed his practice. From this position, Sharif’s work communicated a belief in the transformative potential of art as a practice of critical engagement between individuals and society.

The third son in his family, Sharif grew up in Dubai’s Al Raffa neighbourhood. His drawing skills were recognised early during his studies at Al Sha’ab School in Dubai in the 1960s. By the 1970s, Sharif regularly published satirical caricatures in local newspapers and magazines such as Al Nasr Sports Club magazine and Akhbar Dubai (Dubai News), voicing humorous, scathing positions on political and social issues.

Sharif went to study fine arts in the United Kingdom in 1979. He completed his foundational studies in the town of Leamington Spa and an undergraduate degree at The Byam Shaw School of Art, London (subsumed by Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in 2003) 1984. During his studies in the early 1980s, Sharif established working methods that used repetition, duration, and chance, which he termed ‘semi-systems’ following experimentation with systems art during studies with professor Tam Giles, a teacher of abstract-conceptual art. Changing mathematical systems and random logic patterns were applied to numerical and language structures and everyday physical movements in projects executed on paper or as performances in the streets of London and, later, the deserts on the outskirts of Dubai. This practice of ‘semi-systems’ represented a visual language and methodology of production grounded in the broader network of connected forms and mediums made throughout his career that systematically took apart and recomposed social practices and rituals, methods of production, and the histories of art, including abstract expressionism, systems, and Fluxus events.

‘Semi-systems’ were, for Sharif, a ritualistic activity practised often, if not daily. Sharif’s most significant volume in this series, White Files (1981 –1986), is a catalogue of actions he made over five years, bound together in two oversized folders handmade from cloth and cardboard. First presented in 1984 as a group of works in one folder for his undergraduate thesis exhibition in London, the work continued to grow, eventually incorporating a second file to accommodate additional documentation of projects on his return to Dubai. In these collections of works, making was a visible and crucial element to be shared with the audience. Each ‘system’ was formed of a unique set of numbers written in pencil in grids. He applied logic for each system and set of numbers, then directed his pencil route to connect numbers and dots with line markings, creating a new pattern. The resulting abstracted geometric shapes became drafts that later became paintings on canvas or three-dimensional wood reliefs to be hung on the wall.

White Files also holds materials from ephemeral performances in the streets of the UK and the desert areas surrounding Dubai that document Sharif’s participation in larger global movements in performance and land art. Here, the artist executed exaggerated, routine gestures incorporating everyday movements and objects from written sets and imposed systems of instructions. In one, a rope is tied; in another, stones are thrown. These performances were not public but were attended by a few facilitators, including the artist’s brother. The photographic and written documentation of these actions became the work, upending traditional notions of duration and longevity in ritualistic tendencies of cultural practices. These performances from the early 1980s were some of the first of their kind in the Gulf. They were important because they merged the UAE and London art contexts and brought a new perspective on contemporary art to the local UAE artistic community.

Sharif played a foundational role in developing artistic practices and critical thinking in the region through long-term collaborations with peers and mentoring younger artists. Beginning in 1975, Sharif worked for the Ministry of Youth and Sports (which became the Ministry of Education in 1976), a position he continued in on his return from studying in the UK and through which he ran the art class “Youth Workshops in Dubai”. In 1980, Sharif played a key role in co-founding the Emirates Fine Arts Society, an organisation credited for driving cultural experimentation in the region. In 1984, Sharif also established Al Tashkeel, an arts periodical that provided the artistic community with an educational resource and a place for critical discourse. Later, his collaboration with artists Nujoom Alghanem and Kahlid Albudoor, among others, formed the experimental art space Al Mareija Art Atelier in Sharjah (1984–1985). The Sharjah Department of Culture provided this space, where the group of artists organised independent exhibitions and interventions such as the One Day Exhibition in 1984. Sharif’s collaboration with peers Nujoom Alghanem, Khalid Albudoor, and Yousef Khalil saw the formation of the Aqwas Group, defined by their spontaneous group exhibition at the Sharjah Central Market in 1985.

At this time in the 1980s, his relationships with artists Mohammed Kazem, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Hussain Sharif, and Abdullah Al Saadi began to solidify, forming lifelong connections. Their work independently pushed the limits of the cultural scene in the UAE. Many of this group participated in the independent art space The Flying House, established in Dubai in 2007, which presented and supported local artistic production. Sharif’s mentorship of Mohammed Kazem was one of the strongest relationships in the modern art context of the UAE and made clear his commitment to supporting emerging contemporary artists.

This commitment to collective knowledge building, facilitating learning, and creative expression continued throughout his career through writing and translating texts on art and culture, many of which were published in Al Tashkeel. From the early 1980s, Sharif published these writings in Arabic in the newspapersAl Khaleej and Al-Bayan, positioning his perspective and those of his peers in an international discourse on visual art related to music, philosophy, and literature of the 20th-century arts.

In 1985 Sharif started making his iconic “objects”, for which he is perhaps best known, comprised of multiple individual forms that were first made from composite natural fibres of rope, paper, and cloth that were repeatedly cut and re-woven to a self-imposed process The reconstituted objects reference the quotidian; crushed paper pressed around fabric become colourfully wrapped sweets (Cloth, paper and glue, 1987), and recomposed paper become loaves of bread, doughnuts, or construction rubble (Paper and glue, 1986). In Sharif’s terms, this process of doing and undoing was purposely contrary. He remarked: “I say to myself if the purpose is cutting, why are you tying? If the purpose is tying why are you cutting? I like these kinds of contradictions. It is an act of something, a beautiful act.” These works mischievously confronted society’s material and immaterial complicity with commodities and industry and poked fun at the production of art and culture. This was also true of the books and boxes series initiated in the 1980s and reappearing in the 1990s and the 2000s.

From the late 1980s until his death, Sharif primarily made objects from plastics and metal materials sourced locally in Dubai, particularly the souq. He used shoes, bags, and kitchen items, including foil food containers and spoons. Later, in the 1990s and the 2000s, he consolidated the objects and suspended them from the ceiling or hung them from the wall. Aluminium and copper were frequently used as defining materials in objects and wallworks, their presence representative of the artist’s economic means to invest in these materials. Some were made from iron and intended to be installed outside. Placing these works in the natural elements where they would inevitably deteriorate was a deliberate act that subverted his ability to make these works with more costly materials. Playing with the use value of everyday objects and time invested in production, these works made across his career pulled on art historical traditions of the readymade and factory-line fabrication while poking fun and enjoying the rituals of mass production and consumption.

Despite his production of conceptual works constructed of found objects over many decades, painting remained a critical process for Sharif. Through painting, he documented scenes around him, including everyday objects, work tools, and observations of the natural environment. Still life and portraiture, as well as re-reading — or in his terms, “repainting” — Abstract Expressionism were approaches he continued, operating as a formal and conceptual connection between his playful use of humour and satire. Language was also at the core of these connections, particularly in his employment of the dictionary, which was the source of many chance associations. Words chosen from the dictionary randomly, such as Butterfly, Economic Crisis, and Jellyfish, initiated multiple painting series that adopted those random words as titles. These are related to identifying the connected mechanisms and systems of use value in society, such as capital, labour, organic organisms, and inanimate objects. This dictionary was referenced in White Files (1981–1986) and the large wall sculpture Dictionary (2015), which was made of the pages of four copies of this exact dictionary, including the original used in early performances and semi-system works.

Rooted in the UAE’s accelerated growth post-1971 independence and shifts towards deregulation and international free trade, Sharif’s wide-ranging forms and production processes spoke to new complexities of capitalist ecologies and their consequences on meaning and worth in objects and individuals. Simultaneously, he defiantly claimed a new visual vocabulary of reconstitution — of materials and art histories — when experimental thinking around art was resisted. In the last years of his life, he continued to advocate for progressive cultural thinking through action, writing, translation, and new production.

Sharif‘s work is held in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York and Abu Dhabi, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Tate Modern in London.