Twenty-five years on

Darat al Funun is celebrating this year. It’s 25 years since the art centre, a 4000 square metre hive of buildings dedicated to the visual arts, began its patronage in Amman, and 20 years since it made its home in a hamlet of historic 1920s buildings and rustically restored 6th century Byzantine church. Backed by the Khalid Shoman Foundation, Darat al Funun has won its place as a dynamic, thoughtful and public-friendly centre over the past two decades; it’s hosted countless exhibitions, nurtured artists such as Mona Hatoum and Wael Shawky through its residency programme, and most of all, is a blueprint for how to breathe life into a not-for-profit institution, as it cultivates a lively mix of open studios and workshops, summer festivals, outreach programs and a sunlit arts library.   A contemporary curator from the Netherlands, Eline Van Der Vlist joined Darat al Funun as artistic director in 2012, and first visited the space last May. ‘It was also my first time to Jordan,’ she remembers. ‘The day I arrived, Darat al Funun hosted an open air concert by Egyptian group Eskenderella, in the archaeological site. It was quite an amazing first impression. Over the course of the summer I spent more and more time there and found it to be a unique place, incredibly rich in history in many ways – architecturally, archaeologically, and artistically – full of inspiration and also challenges for the future. It didn’t take me long to say yes to come live in Jordan and to start working there, particularly as we are celebrating 25 years of arts patronage this year.’   Steered by founder and chair Suha Shoman, who Van Der Vlist describes as possessing an ‘unwavering commitment and spirit and knowledge about art, something I learn from every day,’ the Darat al Funun staff is relatively small: eight team members and a few support staff give the space a varied and savvy personality. ‘Each of us has their own strengths, and the great thing is that most people have active interests outside of Darat al Funun, from which we benefit as an institution,’ Van der Vlist says. The centre has no official visitor statistics, and while it’s established itself as a serious presence as far as the art establishment is concerned, its relationship with the local community, they admit, still leaves a lot to be desired.   ‘I think one of our main challenges is to sustain a local audience as well as an audience from outside. We offer a very varied programme of events next to our exhibitions that include talks, music and film screenings,’ says Van Der Vlist, giving Darat al Funun’s collaboration with Tate Britain on a strand of a programme for young people, titled Nahnou-Together, as an example. ‘We work with teachers, we have a print studio that can be used by artists, we have a substantial library that is open to all and we stimulate research through our fellowship programme.’   While Darat al Funun still faces an uphill struggle to create a reciprocal relationship with the city's neighbourhoods, its 2013 programme offers plenty of tempting bait, from film screenings to an anniversary exhibition by Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa. This March, Darat al Funun will host a solo exhibition by Syrian-Armenian photographer Hrair Sarkissian.   Winner of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2012, Sarkissian’s images, often long-term and research-led work taking root in displaced spaces and identities, have previously been exhibited worldwide at galleries such as Tate Modern and SALT but, somewhat surprisingly, this will be the artist’s first solo exhibition to be held in the Middle East.   The exhibition pulls together three of Sarkissian’s projects: Execution Squares, a haunting set of public execution squares in Aleppo, Lattakia and Damascus captured in early morning light; Unexposed, in which the artist investigates an ‘invisible’ Armenian community who have reconverted to Christianity; and Transparencies, a 12-image series of unfinished and abandoned building sites.   This will be Transparencies' first exposure to the public. Sarkissian originally began work on the series in Damascus in 2009, and later ‘took it to another level in Amman’ as part of his ten-week residency at Darat al Funun last year. Although split between two cities, Sarkissian doesn’t feel that relocating the project disrupted the series’ visual consistency. ‘Frankly, all the buildings were the same. The difference is in the construction, not the appearance,’ he says, explaining how he has chosen to present the x-ray like images of the building’s skeletons on small-scale light boxes. ‘The most interesting and intriguing thing for me is these places don’t have a history or a past. That’s why I called them transparencies. When you look at the images they look like old glass negatives and give the sensation you get while looking at x-ray images. You can only see skeletons and the construction of the building.’   Sarkissian is enthusiastic about his time spent at Darat al Funun. ‘It’s very supportive. It’s like a five-star residency,’ he says. ‘The space is amazing. It’s one of the first art centres in the region and now it’s expanding more and more. Now there are residency apartments for artists to come and stay here, which are extremely well-prepared. There’s a very big art library and a lab where visiting artists or people from the neighbourhood can come and make activities and workshops.’   During his stay in Amman, Sarkissian also led a four-day photography workshop at Darat al Funun with a group of local children aged eight to 16 – another first for the photographer. ‘This was my first workshop. I wouldn’t call it teaching, it was a joint exchanging experience,’ he laughs, confessing that, although rewarding, he found working with local children in an art environment a challenge. ‘Here at school they don’t teach anything that’s related to art or imagination.   They had a problem when it came to using their imagination. I think at the beginning they thought we were still in school or something.’    One of the first cross-platform spaces in the Middle East, as Darat al Funun hits the grand old age of 25, it is also one of the region’s most consistent. And the team’s aims for the anniversary year remain the same. ‘Darat al Funun has been at the forefront of supporting art and artists from the Arab world way before it became fashionable in the so-called global scene to collect or showcase artists from the region,’ Van Der Vlist sums up. Diverse, supportive and collaborative, Darat al Funun has earnt its reputation as an archetypal platform for contemporary Arab art.   Photography: Ghassan Aqel