Though the present moment in the Gulf art scene is portrayed as one of novelty and transformation, many of its key entities have grown into venerable players. Turning 20 this year are the region's biggest fair, Art Dubai, one of its largest institutional undertakings, the Saadiyat Museums Project in Abu Dhabi, and one of its leading commercial galleries, The Third Line, which celebrates its anniversary this week.
The Third Line was born out of the anti-Arab sentiment that followed the September 11 attacks against the US in 2001, says Sunny Rahbar, the director of the gallery and one of its three co-founders. She was working at another gallery in New York at the time and was taken aback by the reaction to the event.
“There was all this hate and blame being directed towards the Middle East, which is where I'm from,” she says. “I’d noticed the lack of representation of artists from the Menasa [Middle East North Africa South Asia] region and it dawned on me that their stories must be told.”
Rahbar moved back to Dubai and began imagining a platform for artists from the region. With her friend Lisa Farjam, she launched Bidoun, which became one of the key publications for the discussion of art from the region. After two years and trying multiple avenues, she partnered with a new transplant to Dubai, the art consultant Claudia Cellini, to found an independent art space. UAE regulations at the time required an Emirati sponsor in order to start a business. The diplomat Omar Ghobash backed them, allowing them to launch in 2005 with a show of five Iranian photographers.
The laws also did not strictly allow for non-profit status. They set up with a “framing and novelty trading license”—the same as a craft booth at a mall—and operated somewhere between a commercial gallery and an artists’ space.
“We had film screenings, performances, book clubs—reading books that had been written in Arabic but had been translated into English, and then comparing each version side by side to see what was lost in translation,” Rahbar recalls. “Anytime we could, we had an artists’ talk. And from day one we were commissioning writers for catalogues, to give people information on what contemporary art is, and why it's important.”
The Third Line Doha opened with an exhibition of the photographer Youssef Nabil
Courtesy of The Third Line
The commercial side of their project, however, became buoyed in the larger wave of the early 2000s Dubai art world, itself a part of the huge economic boost in the UAE. Oil prices were rising and the new ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, invested aggressively in tourism, construction, and the financial sector. Christie’s moved in with sales in 2006 that consistently exceeded expectations, and in May 2008, The Third Line opened its second branch, in Doha, in collaboration with the collector Tariq Al Jaidah.
Then, in October, the financial crisis hit. “The phone literally stopped ringing,” Rahbar says. Sales halted as both people and cash left Dubai; The Third Line closed its Doha space less than two years after it launched. And though the UAE rebounded economically by around 2010, the financial crisis left a longer shadow on the art world. Even up to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Rahbar says, sales had not resumed to the volume or level of the pre-2008 days.
In 2016, The Third Line, which had been one of the first to open in the Al Quoz industrial area, joined the city’s other galleries in the new Alserkal Avenue arts district. It leased an 8,500-square-foot, two-storey space with enough room for simultaneous exhibitions. “In retrospect, the space was too big,” Rahbar admits. Within a few years, in 2022, they downsized to a more a manageable single-storey configuration, though, sales-wise, business has been lifted by the current post-Covid bounce of the country.
To mark the anniversary, the gallery will stage an exhibition organised by the writer and curator Shumon Basar, who founded the Global Art Forum, a well-regarded talks programme that runs alongside Art Dubai. The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line (18 September-7 November) charts the gallery's history alongside the socio-economic and political developments of the region.
For the show, Rahbar took Basar to the gallery storage site, by Dubai’s airport, where objects from the last two decades of the gallery’s programmes are held. The show draws fully from these usually unseen works. A series of talks and "48 flash sales" of thematically grouped works from the gallery's archived inventory will accompany the exhibition.
Many of The Third Line’s early artists have become stalwarts of the current scene, both regionally and internationally, such as Rana Begum, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Rokni Haerizadeh, and the late Tarek Al-Ghoussein. These initial shows also reflect lost paths, such as the large presence of Iranian artists. Since the political split between the UAE and Iran has become entrenched, and Iran itself has grown more isolated and economically impoverished, Iranian artists have receded in prominence across the UAE. Conversely the role of Emirati artists has grown, after two decades of investment into education and development programs, and Arab artists have become more represented worldwide.
“When we started, we craved external validation, like getting into Frieze [London] or having one of our artists show at MoMA,” says Rahbar. “But there is a shift in what is important for the next generation. If they do a show at Mathaf [Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha], that counts just as much for them. Maybe we helped to build this confidence. It came from seeing more of their artists in institutions and being taken seriously, though it wasn't always like that.”
