CURATOR & ARTIST

Venetia Porter was Senior Curator for Islamic and Contemporary Middle East art at the British Museum (1989-2022) where she is now Honorary Research Fellow. She studied Arabic and Persian and Islamic Art at the University of Oxford, and her PhD from the University of Durham is on the history and architecture of Medieval Yemen. She was the lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World, opened 2018. Her research and publications range from Islamic tiles, Yemeni history, Arabic inscriptions and amulets to contemporary art, and include her mother’s autobiography Thea Porter’s scrapbook which she edited (Unicorn Press, 2019). Her exhibitions include Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East (London 2006, Dubai 2008), Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam (2012), Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa (2021) and Amakin, 21,39 Jeddah Arts, 9th edition, (Jeddah and Dahran 2022).  Artists making books: poetry to politics, published by British Museum Press will be out in August 2023 and accompanies an exhibition at the British Museum which is on until the end of 2023.

Born in 1986, Al Ain City, UAE Emirati painter and multi-disciplinary artist Hashel Al Lamki’s art unpacks the relationship between humankind and their habitat, the wild and constructed. 
 
Born in Al Ain City, in the shadow of the monumental Jebel Hafit mountain, Al Lamki bore witness to the complex social and spatial dynamics that followed exponential development in the Gulf. Al Ain’s Bedouin culture and distinct social values, its archaeological sites and rugged terrain formed a stark contrast to the rapid industrial and architectural growth that Al Lamki observed in the neighbouring emirates. 
 
In 2011 Al Lamki received his BFA from Parsons School of Design | The New School, New York City. He went on to contribute to several philanthropic collaborative projects in Central and North America. Al Lamki worked in disaster-stricken Guatemala and Haiti and within low social income communities in the US, his cultural projects united by a focus on sustainable practices and social cohesion. After seven years in New York, Al Lamki went on to live between Amsterdam, Netherlands and Taos, New Mexico, where he immersed himself in solution-finding for post-consumerism waste.

Al Lamki’s approach follows the suggestion by Edward T. Hall, anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher, that the relationship between man and the cultural dimension is dialogical and “one in which both man and his environment participate in moulding each other”. Al Lamki’s compositions charter towering mountain ranges, pristine golf courses and architectural feats. They survey shifts in the ecosystem as much as they divulge changes in the social world, tracing intersecting stories of human migration, climate change, c olonisation and evolution. Al Lamki refuses the separation of man and nature, his practice underscoring the dependency of mankind on natural resources and their subsequent responsibility for the environmental catastrophe that looms. His approach to art fuses social innovation, sustainability, and environmental consciousness. Inspired by scientific methodologies and local artisanal processes, Al Lamki’s palette comprises freshly formed pigments derived from natural resources in the MENA region. Through this process of alchemy, the artist articulates the fragility and scarcity of these elements as well as their immense natural powers.