GCC
Gestures I
2016
Thermoformed styrene with flocking, ed. 1/3
17 3/4 by 37 1/4 in. 45.1 by 94.6 cm.
GCC
Gestures II
2016
Thermoformed styrene with flocking, ed. 1/3
47 by 47 in. 119.4 by 119.4 cm.
GCC
Gestures III
2016
Thermoformed styrene with flocking, ed. 1/3 plus 2 AP
37 3/4 by 60 in. 95.9 by 152.4 cm.
GCC
Gestures IV
2016
Thermoformed styrene with flocking, ed. 1/3 plus 2 AP
47 by 62 in. 119.4 by 157.5 cm.
GCC
Gestures V
2016
Thermoformed styrene with flocking, ed. 1/3 plus 2 AP
46 3/4 by 74 1/2 in. 118.7 by 189.2 cm.
GCC
Positive Pathways (+)
Installation view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, 2016
GCC
Positive Pathways (+)
Installation view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, 2016
GCC
Positive Pathways (+)
Installation view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, 2016
GCC
Positive Pathways (+)
Installation view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, 2016
Mitchell-Innes & Nash announces Positive Pathways (+), an exhibition of works by artist collective GCC, opening October 13, 2016. This is the group’s debut show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and their first in the United States since GCC: Achievements in Retrospective at MoMA PS1 in 2014.
The exhibition, which includes installation, wall sculptures and sound, focuses on the increasingly pervasive trend of Healthy Living and Positive Lifestyles gaining momentum in the Middle East. In particular, GCC explores the ways in which these lifestyle attitudes are appropriated, employed, and transformed as part of a greater political mechanism.
The exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash expands upon GCC’s 2016 project at the most recent Berlin Biennale, a sculptural installation of a woman and child. The woman is performing a Quantum Touch exercise, a non-contact touch therapy that became popular in the West in the late 1990s, on a boy as they stand on sand surrounded by a running track. The work, from where the exhibition borrows its title Positive Pathways (+), focuses on the ways that the positive energy movement and body healing practitioners have become co-opted by governments in the region – such as the creation of new ministerial positions like the UAE’s Ministry of Happiness, and the emergence of life coaches and Feng Shui consultants employed by hereditary leaders. Also on view will be a set of sculptural reliefs created using Thermoforming, a commonly used industrial process where thermoplastic sheets are heated and formed on a mold. The reliefs are based on 3D renderings of stills taken from YouTube videos and images found online of regional practitioners promoting the positive energy movement. Ranging from politicians to social media celebrities to TV clerics, these individuals utilize the Positive Energy attitude as a base for state policy. Referring to the erasure and creation of cultural myths, these reliefs create narratives of the present, a mechanism of both nation building and the politics of cultural extinction and creation.
In conjunction with the exhibition, an off-site screening of video works by the collective at Anthology Film Archives will occur on October 15, 2016 followed by a Q&A with all eight collective members.
About GCC
GCC, an acronym that does not necessarily stand for but alludes to the Gulf Cooperative Council (the intergovernmental political and economic partnership that connects six countries in the region), is an artist “delegation” or collective composed of eight members, all of which have strong ties to the Arabian Gulf region of the Middle East. The group was formed in 2013 at Art Dubai and has since shown at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin; Project Native Informant in London; The New Museum, Whitney Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1 in New York; Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; 9th Berlin Biennial; Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; and Fridericianum in Kassel.
Since its debut at Sultan Gallery, Kuwait, the group has continued to address the shifting systems of power in the Gulf region and abroad. GCC live between Kuwait, New York, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin. Apart from several summits held in Switzerland, Kuwait, France and, most recently, New York, Whatsapp is the group’s primary mode of communication.
Collective members:
Nanu Al-Hamad (b. 1987)
Khalid Al Gharaballi (b. 1981)
Abdullah Al-Mutairi (b. 1990)
Fatima Al Qadiri (b. 1981)
Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983)
Aziz Al Qatami (b. 1979)
Barrak Alzaid (b. 1985)
Amal Khalaf (b. 1982)
The show charted the flourishing popularity in the Gulf of "positive lifestyle" practices - encompassing anything from yoga and healthy eating to New Age spiritualties - as well as their instrumentalization by governments as technologies of control.
With its Mitchell-Innes & Nash show, GCC has become like a healer, drawing on the healthy living and positive lifestyle trends currently taking the Gulf region by storm. Positive Pathways (+) (Version II), 2016, an installation similar to one that debuted at this year’s DIS-curated Berlin Biennale, features a sculpture performing the Quantum Touch technique, a form of non-contact touch therapy. (A few days earlier, the members could be seen putting down sand around the sculpture, which, when it was shown in Berlin, was at the center of a teardrop-shaped racetrack.) Nearby is a series of relief works based on stills from YouTube videos that, with their velvety red surfaces, recall fabrics in Titian paintings and over-decorated homes.
GCC is a collective of eight young Arab artists — their name refers to an intergovernmental body called the Gulf Cooperative Council — and their work in “Positive Pathways (+)” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash was inspired by the growing popularity, in the Gulf states, of Western-style New Age healing systems. A hypnotically confident self-help voice-over plays in the gallery, and a nearly life-size plaster figure of a woman wearing a head scarf bends over a figure of a boy. We learn from the publicity release that she’s practicing Quantum Touch therapy, a reiki-like practice that uses the body’s life-force energy to promote wellness.
“We wanted to make a work about the late-blooming New Age culture of the Gulf,” GCC explained via a group-sanctioned e-mail, “and how it is affecting everyone in the region, from conservative housewives to absolute monarchs toying with start-up culture.” The collective’s first Stateside gallery solo show is on view this month at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, in New York, reprising the Berlin installation alongside new work derived from YouTube videos of, among other things, modern-day healers on morning talk shows “making holistic remedies and products out of supermarket items.”
GCC’s first exhibition with the gallery, which features multiple wall pieces, a sculptural installation, and sound work, is concerned with the evolution of various holistic practices—such as alternative healing and life coaching—that are gaining significant influence in Arab Gulf states. The eight artists who make up the collective are all strongly connected to the UAE and the Middle East, and their acronym loosely references that of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Here, they examine the multifocused, multifaceted synthesis of philosophies that fall under the rubric of “Positive Lifestyle” and the implications such Western, New Age ideas have in the context of the Gulf’s ultramodern, constitutionally Islamic societies.
While the power of positive thinking—a popular if fuzzily defined lifestyle credo coined by author Norman Vincent Peale—is a familiar idea to most Americans, the slogan (if not the concept) is largely unknown in the Middle East. In its Mitchell-Innes & Nash debut, the six-member Arab artist “delegation” GCC (an allusion to the Gulf Cooperation Council) focuses on the growth of Cali-style personal realization in its part of the world—and what may get lost in translation. It’s an intriguing subject, but while this exhibition expands on a previous project for the most recent Berlin Biennale, it still barely scrapes the surface.
“An ever-intensifying exposure to Western-centric global media has dulled the effect of existing taboos in the Gulf region,” the eight-member international art collective GCC — a tongue-in-cheek reference to the economic alliance known as the Gulf Cooperation Council — says in a joint statement. “As a result, a number of people there have become proponents of New Age lifestyles, whereas even 10 years ago, many would have probably disapproved of this and even deemed some aspects sacrilegious.”
“The idea of happiness is insidiously used to quell dissent,” GCC member Fatima Al Qadiri told me on the exhibition’s opening day on Thursday, at New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash. According to the party line among the powers that be, if you’re unhappy, never mind actual social problems, she said: “You’re just not being positive!”
“Positive Pathways (+),” an exhibition of works by artist collective GCC, will be on display at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York from October 13 through November 26.
The collective GCC, composed of eight artists with ties to the Persian Gulf, was formed in 2013 during Art Dubai and has since shown at institutions like the New Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1.
