Murtaza Vali - SUN™

Curator's Essay as part of Rays Ripple Residue

On view till April 26, 2025

From the unbearably inhospitable heat of peak summer to the soft sublimity of a winter sunset, the sun is our constant companion in the Gulf. Universal and eternal, it is one of two celestial bodies whose light and movement across the sky helps establish the rhythms of daily life and the changing of the seasons. A wondrous sight, it was worshipped as a deity across the ancient world. The energy it radiates in the form of sunlight is the source of all life on earth, rendered material through photosynthesis by plants, then decaying over millions of years to produce crude oil, the engine of modernity. As such it has long been associated with nourishment, abundance, and happiness. Yet, with each passing day, we feel the sun’s vital glow more intensely on our skins, an intimate and undeniable index of global warming, a reminder of its capacity to both sustain and destroy. 

Challenging the Enlightenment’s elevation of the sun as the symbol of reason and knowledge as a unidimensional abstraction, the surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille developed a more complex, nuanced, and materialist understanding of the sun and our relationship to it. For Bataille, the sun was also “rotten,” profane, its capacity for destruction symbolized by its blinding incandescence at midday, which overwhelms sight when it is “scrutinized,” hindering our ability to look at it directly, to perceive it fully. In The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Bataille developed an alternative economic theory to that of capitalism, based not on scarcity, accumulation, productivity and a compulsion towards endless growth but on surplus and excess, modelled on the sun and its abundant life-giving light. For Bataille, this energy is boundless, far exceeding the earth’s capacity to harness it for growth, resulting in a surplus that he dubbed “the accursed share,” that needs to be expended for the system to continue to function. Historically, this expenditure has taken different forms: the ritualized sacrifice of bodies and/or belongings; the creation and consumption of art and other luxuries; the pursuit of hedonism; and as war or natural disaster. This reading of the sun seems particularly relevant to the contemporary moment, marked by our insatiable desire to continue to consume, accumulate, and expand despite the ever-darkening shadow of the ecological destruction left in its wake.

Produced and exhibited across the UAE over the past decade, the artworks brought together in SUN™ explore how artists experience, understand, and represent the sun here. Like much of nature in the region, they appear to perceive it as a mediated and commodified presence, bound to and by a set of productive forms shaped by the demands of modernity and capitalism: icon, brand, data, and artifact. Yet, by straddling aesthetic and semantic binaries that have long defined the sun—the sublime and the mundane, the eternal and the everyday, the metaphoric and the materialist, representation and abstraction—these works complicate these very forms, revealing how the sun’s blazing vitality always exceeds attempts to control it, forcing us to face its rotten core.

ICON

Shazia Salam’s Emotional State (2022) and Sa Tahanan Co.’s Liham Mula Sa Araw (Letters from the Sun) (2025) both draw inspiration from Modesh, the cheery mascot of Dubai Summer Surprises, an annual shopping festival launched in 1998 to draw tourists to the city during the hot summer months. Recently redesigned to look more anthropomorphic, Modesh originally had a yellow jack-in-the-box-style accordion body and a grinning sun for a face, crowned by seven beams one representing each emirate. Originally produced as part of a broader investigation into Dubai’s voice-over industry, Salam’s Emotional State consists of a voice recording and its spectral frequency audio visualization turned into a heat map, as if the sun’s corona was stretched out into a panorama. Opening with a sweltering temperature forecast that is positively spun as “radiant,” the narrative unfurls, prompted by a Modesh sighting along the highway, into a reflection on what this capitalist rebranding of an ancient sun deity, and the happiness he embodies, means to the city and its inhabitants. Through a script that incorporates material from newspaper articles, blogs, and social media we learn that he is both adored and reviled, even inspiring a Facebook group entitled “Death to Modesh,” whose members imagine and share elaborate and gruesome scenarios for his demise. Performed by Ana Schofield, the familiar voice of Emirates Airlines, the recitation’s emotional tenor rises in intensity—as per the artist’s instructions—until happiness gives way to a hysteria that feels emancipatory, and the warm welcoming smile becomes a demonic grin. Playing on the multiple meanings of “state” in its title, the work critiques the performance of happiness as a marketing strategy, a civic ideal, and a national aspiration.
Modesh was created by the late Romulo “Romy” Miclat, a Filipino artist, architect, and illustrator who lived and worked in the U.A.E. for many decades. Sa Tahanan Co.’s Liham Mula Sa Araw (Letters from the Sun) (2025) honors Miclat’s memory and legacy through a collaborative project that draws on the art collective’s growing network of Filipino creatives from and/or currently working in the country. It pairs a display of seven takeaway postcards—featuring images made by some of these artists in response to the question: “What is a Dubai Summer Surprise for you?”—with a commissioned essay that traces the history of Modesh and his maker. Presenting the perspective of those unable to escape the unbearable heat for cooler climes, the images range from hazy midsummer views of both old and new Dubai to polaroids capturing fleeting impressions of holiday fun and frolic; from an image of collective joy at a cherished monsoon festival commemorated in a home far away from home to that of a balikbayan box used to send things back to loved ones sealed with tape whose colors recall distant tropical sunsets; from a kitsch critique of vapid viral consumer trends to a preteen-esque collage that reclaims the figure of Modesh—and claims the joy and fun he symbolizes—as part of the Filipino experience in the UAE. Inspired by Miclat’s iconic creation, Sa Tahanan Co.’s constellation of words and images shifts agency and authorship back to those whose labor continues to shape Emirati visual culture, but whose contributions and identities remain invisible and unacknowledged.

BRAND

In conceptual provocations that appear simple but are thematically nuanced, at once poetic and political, Lantian Xie and Charbel-jospeh H. Boutros begin to untangle the relationship between the sun and identity through the notion of the brand/name. Xie’s SUNSHINE (2018) consists of a long folding table covered from end to end with plastic bottles of Al Ain-brand Vitamin D fortified water. Recreating a refreshments table one might find at a reception or a rave, Xie’s deadpan sculpture highlights the absurdity of using the addition of Vitamin D as a marketing gimmick in a hot desert environment where sunshine is abundant year-round, oftentimes oppressively so. When first presented seven years ago, the plastic bottles were arranged in a precise grid, their orange caps and labels—meant to evoke the sun—aligning into an abstract horizon. The product has since been discontinued and age and transport to and from exhibitions have deformed many of the original bottles disrupting the order of the original presentation, transforming a wry critique of capitalist cynicism into an unintended reflection of the worsening effects of climate change. 
Part of his “Sun Works” series, Boutros’s Birthday (2016) was made using a custom stencil and the Dubai sunshine on his birthday to brand his name on a blank sheet of newsprint paper, the exposed letters yellowing slightly due to exposure to the sun’s UV rays. Draped somewhat unceremoniously over a metal bar like a flag or banner, the sheet of paper floats just above eye level, forcing us to look up and squint, like we might at the midday sun, to read the ghostly name imprinted on it. While complicating the idea and authority of artistic authorship, Birthday also represents an attempt to sculpt the ineffable, registering a physical trace of an otherwise impalpable material such as sunlight and arresting, at least visually, the inevitable passage of time. With the letters becoming less legible over time as the paper that surrounds them darkens, it is also ultimately an ephemeral gesture, a meditation on finitude and the eventual erasure of the self, as symbolized by the artist’s name, a crisis that is at once existential and environmental, individual and global.

DATA

A quick scroll through our smartphone photo libraries will definitely turn up one, if not a few, images of the sunset, both a romantic cliché and an undeniably sublime sight. For the duration of his performance My job is to look at the sunset (2023), Khalid Jauffer takes a photograph of or related to the setting sun on his smartphone every day, turning this familiar act into a daily ritual and a type of labor. Each image is transmitted in real time to the gallery, where it is printed out on a sheet of A4 paper and pinned to the wall creating a growing calendar-like grid, a visual diary composed of daily instances of a natural phenomenon translated into digital data. First made in Dubai in the interim between fulltime employment and art school, this quotidian ritual functioned as a surrogate job, simultaneously structuring time freed from the capitalist grind and reclaiming it for both reverie and the work of art. This iteration of Jauffer’s project unfolds in London, where he is currently based. While the sunset could easily be experienced and captured by the artist along the Emirati coast, it is a more elusive subject in the frequently overcast and geographically inland British capital. Mapping onto Jauffer’s own homesickness, this displacement imbues the project with an additional layer of longing and melancholy.
Nima Nabavi similarly translates the experience of the setting sun into a type of digital code, distilling its chromatic gradient into a geometric abstraction. Acknowledging the sun’s energy as the origin of life in its title, Nabavi’s Source Code (2024) was first hand-drawn on a computer and then rendered on canvas using a pen-plotter, a device more commonly employed to print out architectural blueprints. It consists of multiple overlays of a simple design: a circle divided into five horizontal colored bands of equal height—yellow, orange, red, pink and purple, from top to bottom—each composed of parallel rows of discrete dots. To approximate the sun’s spherical shape in two-dimensions, Nabavi rotated this pattern six times by seven and half degree increments in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions, and used leftover pens from past projects till they ran out of ink to give the final work an uneven texture, reintroducing the unpredictability, complexity, and wonder of nature into a coded abstract form.

ARTIFACT

Casually leaning against opposite walls, Raja’a Khalid’s and Pratchaya Phinthong’s monumental stele-like abstractions mirror each other in scale but are chromatically and materially distinct. Khalid’s High Noon (2016) is a pair of monochrome steel panels covered in dichroic paint, popular among custom car enthusiasts. Glowing like molten lava, they distill the sensation of an unbearable Emirati summer into a luminous color field. The iridescent automotive paint transforms the abstract surfaces into radiant objects, diffusing the color, light and, the associated suggestion of heat, of the sun at its most intense into the surrounding space. Through this shrewd choice of paint, which embeds the otherwise autonomous monochrome within a broader context of automobility, Khalid subtly raises the specter of car exhausts and carbon emissions, and by extension the oil industry. Research suggests that increasing pollution produces more spectacular and vivid sunsets, and Khalid’s fusion of color, climate, and car culture, indicates how the latter shapes both the weather and our perception of it, both visual and otherwise.
While Khalid obliquely reminds us of the dangers posed by our continuing reliance on fossil fuels, Phinthong’s We are lived by powers we pretend to understand (2024) interrogates the value of a key technology in the transition to renewable and sustainable energy sources: solar panels, whose adoption here, where sunshine is abundant, has been somewhat belated. Carefully recreating their characteristic grid pattern in acrylic paint on sheets of polished grey granite, Phinthong presents uncanny facsimiles that trick the eye and scramble timelines, materially transforming a futuristic technology into an archaeological artifact. These minimalist gravestones seem to anticipate their own failure, prematurely mourning the future they promise. Like black mirrors, they beseech us to reflect on whether the widespread adoption of solar and other clean energy technologies is a realistic solution to the worsening climate crisis.

*****

Revealing the growing complexity and maturity of artistic practice and discourse in the UAE over the past decade, the diverse conceptual, material, and process-based approaches brought together in SUN™ are pitched between the sun’s eternal beauty and increasingly urgent critiques of capitalism, consumption, and climate change. They offer a quiet but sharp critique, mapping out some of the ways in which the extractive and consumptive logics of the oil era persist despite a growing discursive and technological shift toward renewable energy and sustainable futures, revealing the contradictions embedded in prevailing narratives of modernity and progress.