Art Dubai Commissions 2016 artists include Doa Aly, the collective trioNile Sunset Annex, Sreshta Rit Premnath and Massinissa Selmani. Running alongside the residency and projects programme A.i.R Dubai, Art Dubai Commissions is curated this year by Yasmina Reggad.
Doa Aly (top right) earned a BFA in painting in 2001 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cairo. She started her career with an interest in the body, anatomy, and movement, which evolved over the years into an interest in psychology, ideas of power, sexuality and language. Her art practice spans drawings, painting, performance-based videos, and text-collages, mostly drawing on classical fiction, medical literature, mythology, philosophy, and most recently current news articles. Aly has exhibited in prestigious international institutions and biennials including Tate Modern (London), ICP (New York) and Haus DerKunst (Munich) as well as Busan, Istanbul and Dakar Biennials. Doa Aly is represented by Gypsum Gallery.
Nile Sunset Annex (bottom) is an evolving production and dispersion outfit for contemporary art. Founded in 2013, it’s a small self-funded art space that puts on exhibitions of artists’ work in a flat in Cairo, but also acts as a publisher, an art collection, an archivist, an editor, a technician, and an artist, author, barmaid or curator when necessary. Its current iteration consists of Taha Belal, Jenifer Evans and Andeel.
Sreshta Rit Premnath (top left, Image Credit: Graeme Mitchell, 2011) is the founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter and co-organizes the ongoing Dictionary of the Possible. Premnath completed his BFA at The Cleveland Institute of Art, his MFA at Bard College, and has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan and Smack Mellon. He has had solo exhibitions at KANSAS, New York; Gallery SKE, Bangalore; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Wave Hill, New York; Art Statements, Art Basel; as well as numerous group exhibitions at venues including Queens Museum, New York; YBCA, San Francisco; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; 1A Space, Hong Kong and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. He has received grants from Art Matters and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and was awarded the Arthur Levitt Fellowship from Williams College. Premnath is Assistant Professor at Parsons, New York. Sreshta Rit Premnath is represented by Gallery SKE.
Massinissa Selmani (top centre) was born in 1980 in Algiers and currently lives and works in France. Before starting his artistic career, Masinissa studied computer science in Algeria. In 2005, he moved to France to study at the School of Fine Arts of Tours where he graduated in 2010. His work tries all kinds of experiments that drawing allows, and is characterized by extreme simplicity – often presenting montages of images and drawings, or short animations in which mingle humor, irony, and sometimes even a sense of revolt. Massinissa’s images reveal the ambiguities of the signs and push their juxtapositions until absurdity. The subjects of his works often rooted in political news, social news and press clippings. The images that they show have been under a selection process, treatment, cropping and encoded according the documentary codes, archives system, and sometimes even put in a scenery or a narration allows a various experimentations fields. Massinissa Selmani is represented by Selma Feriani Gallery.
