Art Meets Ag Issues on the Arabian Peninsula

The emirate of Sharjah (lesser known than the neighboring emirate of Dubai) is home to this intriguing ag-themed art installation as part of the Sharjah Biennale. The piece tackles controversial issues such as genetically modified engineering, global food production, food security and bio fuels. The installation, one of just three winners of the 2015 Sharjah Biennale Prize, will be on display until June 5th.

Spanish Artist Asuncion Molinos (born in 1979) began researching agricultural issues in 2006. But, as she told Modern Farmer, the roots of her interests are much deeper: “I came from a family of farmers in rural Spain. I’ve witnessed the rural exodus provoked by the industrialization of farming and the masculinization of agricultural work.” Today she splits her time between Spain, Egypt and Oman.

As a result, Molinos is passionate about both agriculture issues and Egypt – interests she often combines in her work. Another one of her installations, “The Not Egyptian Restaurant” was a pop-up eatery in Ard al-Lew, one of Cairo’s ashiwiat, or informal neighborhoods. The first week of the restaurant saw Iranian-Swedish chef Elisabeth Shogi prepare affordable meals for Egyptians made from local crops normally grown for the export market. Other weeks were designed to focus on meals made from the typical weekly budget of an Egyptian household – 100 pounds (roughly $13) – or feature food grown within Ard al-Lew.

Like many similar communities, Ard al-Lew was illegally built on some of Egypt’s best farmland; this is a fact Molinos knows well, having spent five months researching agriculture in Egypt to better inform her work. “From the big agribusiness to the small producers or fellaheen, Egypt’s agriculture is the oldest and best documented in the world,” she said. Herodotus once noted that Egyptian farmers “gather in fruit from the earth with less labor than any other men.” Egypt’s granaries were once the foundations of empires from the Romans to the Ottomans. Yet today, generous government wheat subsidies have turned Egypt, a country with one of the world’s highest wheat consumption rates per capita, into the world’s largest wheat importer.

The World Agricultural Museum looks at broader global agricultural issues with an Egyptian frame of reference. The idea for WAM came as a result of the artist’s 2009 visit to Egypt’s Agricultural Museum after reading about it in Lonely Planet. The Agricultural Museum, which dates to 1938, is housed in the former palace of Princess Fatima (the daughter of Khedive Ismail).

While the original agricultural museum was basically a piece of state propaganda, WAM lampoons agricultural trends, often by using language and displays similar to the original museum. This includes hand-painted panels, dioramas, oil paintings and bombastic statements of “fact.” For example, one display suggests Egypt has enough water for more than double its current population, which at current usage rates is not true. The country will struggle to meet its water needs by 2050. As Molinos explains, the WAM exhibit “mixes parody and propaganda with real data and facts in a way that is difficult to differentiate…The intention behind doing this is to get the audience to find for themselves about what is actually going on.”

WAM’s first appearance was at a downtown Cairo apartment in 2010. It subsequently became a touring exhibition with appearances in Bristol in 2011 and is currently part of the Sharjah Biennale. After Sharjah, WAM will be featured at the MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum (LeÁ³n, Spain) from September until December of this year.

The low, abandoned warehouse used in Sharjah seems a good fit for the WAM exhibition. The initially dusty curtains and mothball smell adds to WAM’s message that key agricultural issues are often ignored. In a hallway, closed doors suggest taboo topics, and a sign dedicated to labor appears to have fallen onto the floor. The Sharjah Biennale’s own guidebook describes WAM as “a museum of the future in which the truths of our present reveal their potential obsolescence and fragility.”

The displays mix nostalgia, natural history and the naÁ¯ve. The results can be humorous: a shadowbox contains a scale model of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault covered in faux snow (which appears to be table salt). The image gently mocks efforts to make the site an iconic structure. Another wall contains Kafkaesque illustrations of gene splicing between a potato and a spider, which the artist concedes is meant to lampoon real-life projects: GMO spider-goats and cabbage-scorpions.

Some of the darker aspects of global agricultural policy are also featured. One room contains a handmade map marking the location of the 572 farmer suicides that occurred in India’s Vidarbha region between 2005 and 2010. India has seen 270,000 farmer suicides since 1995. The Guardian, among other publications, speculates the higher costs of genetically modified cotton seeds to be a factor in the deaths (Monsanto has published an in-depth rebuttal of this claim).

Probably the most provocative part of the WAM are two display cases which examine food security in Haiti. One display case labeled “What Haiti Produces” shows a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables and nuts. This is dramatically contrasted with the next display case, “What Haitians Eat,” which shows the famous “clay cookies” some Haitians were reduced to eating in recent years.

Visitors offered mixed reactions to the exhibit. Maya Zanati, a local who recently visited the exhibit, said “It feels kind of weird and unsettling to walk in the corridors, it doesn’t feel like an art exhibit…the use of display cases can make it feel like a school trip.” Karim Emam Moustafa, a culture critic with Qatar Today, said, “After having visited the Agricultural Museum in Cairo, several times it was interesting to visit WAM and see that antique museum recast as a way of provoking new thinking on controversial issues in agriculture. The use of old telephones and simple drawings add a level of nostalgia. I think the artists doesn’t have a single purpose in mind; it is meant to be thought-provoking.”