Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo, founder of the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation

Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo is the founder and Artistic Director of the Abu Dhabi Festival, and founder of the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (ADMAF). An Emirati with a Saudi father and a Syrian mother, she was born in Beirut, educated in Paris and raised her family in Abu Dhabi with her husband, Mohamed Abdul Latif Kanoo, an artist and director of the Kanoo Group conglomerate. She is a driving force in the Abu Dhabi cultural scene. Here she speaks with LUX Leaders & Philanthropists Editor Samantha Welsh about mentoring artists and the next generation, and elevating the cultural scene in the UAE

Samantha Welsh: How has your background shaped your passion for the arts?

Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo: I was brought up in Beirut, a crossroads of cultures, where my father was one of Lebanon’s leading merchants.  We were raised to be curious, to value tolerance, and to embrace a cultural life that brings joy. My seven siblings were all into business and science but from early childhood I insisted on joining every school musical and dance production.

I was creative, and I think that’s a gift.

Ram Han, Room Type 02, 2018, to be exhibited in ‘Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits’

I was fascinated by the Arabic language and literature, calligraphy, and by writers and poets like Khalil Gibran. I was drawn to philosophy. To understand arts and culture was to try to process life itself, whether that be the horror of war through Picasso’s Guernica or the joy of love through Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

SW: Why do you focus on making a difference through the arts?

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HAK: I went away to the American College in Paris and that was an epiphany, a moment of total enlightenment. Museums, opera, theatre – the cultural life was an épanouissement and I blossomed. I studied History of Classical Music, but within the American College system all students also played an instrument except for me, so I wanted to drop this course. The professor dismissed the idea right away and encouraged me, saying: “Your essays show your understanding of the emotion behind the art, you listen, and you go beyond what is expected.” So I stayed and I am so glad because now I am truly pursuing my passion.

When I married and moved to the UAE, I did not make a conscious decision to get involved in arts philanthropy; I just saw things around me that were missing. Within the state educational system, whether school or university, liberal arts as a whole – including music – were not offered at a deep level.

I felt strongly that while I had had that privilege to study the arts, most young people did not. UNESCO’s Article 19, within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, holds that all people have a right to learn, create, and have access to all liberal arts. So here I was, in Abu Dhabi, married with three children, and I had identified a need and realised I could make a difference.

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SW: How did you get started?

HAK: In 1996, I began working among communities on the ground to help fill noticeable gaps in arts education. I visited state schools where children did not learn an instrument and where no concerts or plays were put on. We started with no governance, just a set-up in my backyard with me covering the costs.

I would invite university students from Zayed University, along with their professors and families, and we would sit in small circles with the community, sharing our knowledge and experience. I soon realised my approach needed to become more proactive and strategic to have impact.

SW: What was your approach?

HAK: I was purpose-driven because when you work closely with communities it is important to create opportunities by building connections. If people don’t believe in what you are doing, it is unlikely to gain momentum or achieve lasting results. But when it means something to people, they relate to it, take ownership of it, and benefit from it.

At ADMAF, working with young people is our number one priority. We share knowledge through education, offer opportunities, and invest in that talent. We open doors for conversations with emerging and established talent at community level and beyond. We create opportunities for connections between nations, cultures, and people by connecting audiences to artists and in doing that we also open opportunities for Abu Dhabi with REW. My approach is based on connection and collaboration.

SW: How does this work at macro-level?

Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo founded the Art @ Embassies programme, which showcases Emirati artists’ work through themed exhibitions hosted at partnered embassies around the world

HAK: We nurture Emirati artists to grow their talent, encourage dialogue, and support their development as cultural ambassadors representing the UAE on the global stage. Our Art @ Embassies programme showcases our artists through themed exhibitions hosted at embassies we have partnered with across the world.

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We also loan works from the ADMAF Art Collection, arrange reciprocal music concerts, organise artist residencies, screen UAE-filmmakers’ work, and celebrate Emirati literature through book signings and panel talks – all aimed at challenging perspectives, fostering cultural understanding, and supporting the cultural ecosystem.

SW: What makes the Abu Dhabi Festival an effective cultural platform?

HAK: The Abu Dhabi Festival, ADMAF’s flagship initiative, brings together leading cultural institutions for the public good. ADMAF links the arts with action, and our purpose is to serve others. We are not just event organisers but we make a long-term difference through securing operational funds and sharing ideas and talent.

ADMAF introduced Emirati artists to perform at Carnegie Hall

We have moved the dial at every level – from encouraging schoolchildren to discover an instrument, to introducing artists to perform at Carnegie Hall, to creating partnerships on an international scale. Locally, we have become a platform where tradition and innovation come together to open new networks. Internationally, we focus on cultural diplomacy – starting conversations and building bridges. These dialogues take many forms. For example, co-productions like our recent world premiere concert at Kensington Palace where three brilliant Emirati musicians performed alongside international artists.

A recent world premiere concert at Kensington Palace where three Emirati musicians performed alongside international artists, facilitated by ADMAF

Another example is an institutional collaboration, notably our ongoing three-year institutional partnership with the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA).

ADMAF is partnering with the Seoul Museum of Art, curating the exhibition ‘Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits’; one of the pieces in the exhibition by Chung Seoyung, What I Saw Today, 2022

SW: What is unique about the partnership between ADMAF and SeMA?

HAK: The Seoul Museum of Art’s (SeMA) collection exhibition in the UAE is the first collaboration founded under royal patronage of its kind in the Middle East. It is the first large-scale showcase of Korean contemporary art in the region and catalyses a major three-year collaboration between ADMAF and SeMA to promote cultural diplomacy between Abu Dhabi and South Korea.

Byungjun Kwon, Dancing Ladders, to be exhibited in ‘Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits’

This historic exhibition in Abu Dhabi, entitled Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits, features 48 works by 29 Korean visual artists, showcasing the evolution of Korea’s media art scene over five decades, highlighting pioneering artists who have helped define contemporary art today, and showing crossovers with the artistic landscape of the UAE.

Ayoung Kim’s work to be exhibited in ‘Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits’

SW: How will you continue this cultural conversation?

HAK: Following the first exhibition in Abu Dhabi, this cultural dialogue will continue with a second co-curated show, Intense Proximities, opening at SeMA in Seoul this December. The exhibition will introduce contemporary art from the UAE to Seoul, bringing together three generations of artists based in the country. Alongside these exhibitions, we are also publishing Layered Dialogues, featuring contributions from UAE-based writers, which provides a richer insight into the cultural exchange between Korea and the UAE.

Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo is the founder of the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF), Co-founder and Artistic Director of Abu Dhabi Festival, and leads a 3-year institutional collaboration between ADMAF and the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)

Alain Servais is an investment banker and collector of art-as-ideas, whose family collection is showcased in The Loft, a repurposed factory in central Brussels. In a conversation moderated by LUX’s Leaders & Philanthropists editor, Samantha Welsh, Servais speaks with South Asian philanthropist and collector, Durjoy Rahman, about supporting artists who give minorities a voice and make people think.

Alain Servais (left) and Durjoy Rahman (right). Photo montage by Isabel Phillips

LUX: How has business shaped your your passion for art?

DURJOY RAHMAN: I started my career at a very young age when I started my business in textiles and garments production. It was when I started exporting that I found that I experienced a negative perception about Bangladesh. I had to engage in a kind of cultural diplomacy when I went to business meetings! I would talk positively about the good things happening in Bangladesh, sharing what was interesting for buyers in course of business development.

ALAIN SERVAIS: For me it was about filling a gap rather than part of my business plan. Investment banking is about trying to understand human nature, anticipating what will happen, asking questions, maybe about the effects of a societal drift to the far right, or changing attitudes to minorities, the potential disruption from new tech and social media, and so on. So understanding herd instinct is very important. In its way it’s pretty sterile as it is all about money. You are missing the voices of so many different people. That is what is interesting in Art.

LUX: How did you become interested in art?

AS: I have no collector-parents, no experience of studying or making art at all, I fell into art by accident. It’s about the convergence of those interesting parts of human nature, professional and private, a kind of curiousness. And that came from working in investment banking, because you are so used to absorbing a massive amount of data and opinion to make decisions.

DR: It was an accident for me too. I was visiting New York and I first saw the silk screens of Marilyn Monroe and Ingrid Bergmann (which in fact I eventually collected). I decided to license and reprint the graphics on a European fashion brand T-shirt, by Replay I remember. It was this fashion x art collaboration which catalysed my art journey.

LUX: So discovery is a big part of your vision?

DR: Yes, I was frequently away on business in Europe and North America, and I would visit the many galleries and museums as I was passing through, always noticing the contrast with South Asia, where we had few institutions despite our long cultural heritage and traditional practices. So that’s why I decided that one day I would do something about it by creating a platform of my own.

AS: I love traveling, discovering other cultures, getting close to parts of the world that people have prejudice and ignorance about.  I had the chance to go to Bangladesh and discovered a totally different, very rich culture. The way I process the experience is through bringing back works of art.

LUX: Should collectors open the door to alternative realities?

AS: We should stop making out that collectors are Superman/woman! We are just human beings finding outlets in art, revealing society’s many problems in the process.  This is about my own interest in contemporary culture.  I have a real problem with nostalgia and the selfishness of it all.

Artworks in a 2019-2020 exhibition at The Loft, the 900 square meter space which has housed the Servais family collection since 2010.

LUX: Is this why you collect ‘emerging’ artists?

AS: Emerging artists for me are the artists who are not selling-out to that nostalgic drive. It’s about the art created today that is worth preserving. Every major museum on the planet is based on the private collections of a few crazy collectors who plugged into whatever was going on in society at that time and collected artists who were expressing that in a particularly advanced way. For instance, forty years ago, Sophie Calle the French installation artist was already anticipating social media and reality shows – people want to watch people. So it’s about collecting and preserving artists’ works really early on, when Society does not yet understand their message.

DR: I agree, I really dislike the term ‘emerging artist’! These are claims not accurate predictions of who will be a great artist. In the art world, there is a structure, a platform, discipline, practice, so we can to an extent deduce who may emerge to be a strong or great artist. As to how successful they will be, that is far harder to judge. If you look at Bangladesh, Bangladesh is only 52 years old, so most artists here have actually been ‘emerging’ since 1971 ie post-Independence. DBF supports artists from this period and empowers them to create innovative bodies of work, influenced by social change. It’s about their context, their transmission of their knowledge and their influences.

Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation Creative Studio in Dhaka features works from around the Global South including, ‘Orator’ By William Kentridge (right) and ‘Rise of a Nation’ By Raghu Rai (left)

AS: Yes, yesterday I bought an innovative work from an artist from Bali. She had been totally underestimated to the extent she had never, in fact, even been called an ‘emerging artist’. She had, though, created new narratives through traditional Balinese painting and coloration, all pretty outrageous and about sexual liberation, lots of crazy images of penises, vaginas and everything. A good artist is someone that sends a message to the world, and a good collector is the one that understands this message before the masses. They are two sides of the same coin.

LUX: How is art messaging the voices of minority artists?

DR: We should first define what ‘minority’ means. After all, it means different things to different people. Sometimes, I feel like a minority when I enter the room at an event in the global North! It can be discomforting but I get over it with introductions and conversations.

AS: Yes, Durjoy, you’re right, you are a minority when traveling, and I am even an minority in Belgium – because when people visit The Loft they don’t get the art at all and probably think my kids should be taken into care! We are both minorities because we are both free-thinking individuals and non-conformists.

The Great Revel of Hairy Harry Who Who: Orgy in the cellar, 2015, by Athena Papadopoulos, in Dérapages & Post-bruises Imaginaries, the 2018-2019 exhibition at The Loft in Brussels.

DR: With the minority artists in Bangladesh, it’s not just about their religion or social status but can be about differences in cultural practice. For example, the remote Hill Tracts indigenous communities in Bangladesh are considered to be minorities, so when we talk about the cultural heritage of Bangladesh, DBF showcases their arts and crafts to the global North. By shining a light on their art we are bringing them into the discourse and including them in society. With our Future of Hope program during Covid, we included these indigenous artists from the Hill Tracts and two have become very prominent right now. Similarly, we took our project for Kochi Biennale from the remote northern region of Bangladesh. This was a very significant artwork created by ethnic communities who would never have been exhibited on the world stage.

Installation view of Bhumi, with support from The Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India.

AS: I learn a lot from the artists from the global South. Recently, I bought a work by a photographer from Bangladesh. It is an image around infrastructure, bridges, highways and I wanted it not just because I loved the aesthetic but because the message around it was deliberately unfinished. After I’d bought the work, not before, I made sure I sat next to the photographer at the festival dinner and was grateful for the experience of talking with him, on equal terms. It is a two-way business.

LUX: What is the responsibility of the audience toward the artist?

DR: Artists practice as they wish. It’s how the audience accepts their work that is the question. As a collector and as a founder of a foundation, we open up the opportunity for a deeper engagement from the audience with the artist’s social concerns. These activations are beyond direct action and inventions, creating a positive ripple effect. You have to ask yourself, ‘Am I here to change the world or to support a range of alternatives?’ We enable artists to create bodies of work that widen their potential for recognition on the world stage by bringing awareness of their voice and their cause.

Parables of the Womb by Dilara Begum Jolly at DBF Creative Studio.

AS: As far as the responsibility of the artist is concerned, I don’t like the quasi-deification of the artist. There are so many bad artists around! It is not enough to call yourself an artist to be an artist. I was with a collector in Istanbul last week and he told me he had reserved an exhibition space for a solo exhibition by an emerging artist, emphasising it had to be an artist with no gallery representation. It was to be for six weeks. He actually refused the the first offer, saying “I want to see if artists will fight for it!” For him, the fighting was an important element as so many artists were not thinking about what they are doing and why they were doing it.

LUX: Where do you think your art philanthropy will be, ten years’ from now?

DR: With DBF, we want to be an influential and vital activist who has used the power of art and culture to good effect, to make positive, impactful change in terms of social justice. I agree with Alain, we must question everything and that curiosity must inform our vision for the next decade.

Servais hosts exhibitions from his collection of international contemporary artists at The Loft, where he also hosts artists’ residencies.

AS: Because governments are funding the arts the arts less and less, I spend more and more time documenting the works I’m acquiring! I’m doing this to record for posterity the complexity of the artist’s thinking. I hope institutions give more power to curators to offer opportunities to interesting artists so we have the vital two-way discussions. I think we are going to go through extremely difficult times and I would not like to be this young generation. We need people like Durjoy, we need these discourses, we must give people a voice, and we must make people think!

Find out more: durjoybangladeshfoundation.org

Servais Family Collection on Instagram: @collectionservais