GCC collective to take over The Room at Art Dubai

Portrait of GCC. Courtesy of Art Dubai.

GCC, an art collective formed in 2013 and consisting of eight members will take over The Room at Art Dubai, 2018. The Room is an immersive, large-scale interactive installation situated at the heart of the art fair and will take the form of an extended TV studio for the daytime talk programme, GOOD MORNING GCC (صباح الخير  جي. سي. سي). 

GOOD MORNING GCC (صباح الخير  جي. سي. سي.) uses the tropes of daytime talk shows commonly featured on TV stations across the Arab world alongside a reference to Nam June Paik’s “Good Morning Mr. Orwell”, Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, Chris Burden’s commercials and other artists who have used television’s potential to communicate to a wide audience.

Celebrity wedding singer and TV chef Sulaiman Al Qassar, an icon of food and performance, will launch the programme with a performative cooking demonstration on a stage design reflecting a behind-the-scenes backstage aesthetic which will be the anchor for a series of dailyTV segments, performances, and parties over the course of the fair.

GCC is 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.

Founded in the VIP lounge at Art Dubai in 2013, the collective GCC has continued to address the shifting systems of power in the Gulf region and abroad. Collective members are: Nanu Al-Hamad, Khalid Al Gharaballi, Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Fatima Al Qadiri, Monira Al Qadiri, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid, Amal Khalaf.

• Art Dubai. March 21-14, 2018. Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai.