True||When art critics and their kin talk about the stuff they find in gallery and museum exhibitions, it’s a convenient fallback position to describe how it’s made.||

DUBAI: When art critics and their kin talk about the stuff they find in gallery and museum exhibitions, it’s a convenient fallback position to describe how it’s made. It may be oddly rare to read pronouncements about whether the work in a show is any “good” or not, but writers can drone on about techniques and media used to create work – whether painstakingly crafted objects like sculpture or new media works – and how that comes into play in reading them.

Thanks to the blossoming of the international art market (art’s greatest artifice), it became lucrative for talented craftsmen to forge art for a living – provoking the invention of expertise on matters of authenticity, and inspiring Orson Wells to make his entertaining 1973 doc “F is for Fake.”

Yet culture doesn’t monopolize the world of public exhibitions and private collectors. For the longest time natural history museums – with their displays of the fossilised remains of extinct beasts and plants – successfully competed with art museums and galleries for the hearts and minds of the public.

There’s big money to be had in monumental fossils to be sure, and a lucrative (relatively unregulated) trade has grown up around widespread discoveries of dinosaur remains in locations like Mongolia and Morocco. Yet the public can be confident that forgers respect the basic distinction between nature and culture.

They fake paintings but not fossils, right?

Yto Barrada might disagree.

The handicraft of preparing fossils for the market is the subject of “Faux Départ” (False Start) and “Lying Stones,” a pair of new works by the Moroccan artist on display in “Before History,” an exhibition having a brief run at the Madinat Jumeira conference center – the venue of Art Dubai, the emirate’s yearly art fair.

Those familiar with the “making-of” documentary will immediately recognize what Barrada’s up to in “Faux Départ.”

A brief establishing shot fixes the location as a Moroccan desert town (in the south of the country). Another shot shows the interior of an ad hoc exhibition room, where a complete-looking T-rex skeleton stands out as the largest piece in a collection that also includes plenty of trilobites – those multilegged sea-going critters that first appeared some 520 million years ago.

Working without voiceover, Barrada’s camera alights upon a workshop where men apply power tools – dental drills, circular saws and the like – to shape chunks of rock. They might be using the tools to “clean up” fossils, or to actually carve them (their resemblance, at least) into slabs of stone.

As the film wears on, it’s clear from the range of dyes, augmenting concrete and molds applied to the stones – not to mention the deliberation with which scorpion corpses are used to make a “fossil” – that there is plenty of forgery at work in this trade.

Perhaps two-thirds of the way through this 23-minute work, a Moroccan voiceover details the inventory of tools used in the fossil trade – from picks, shovels and circular saws to sandpaper – and what for, while the tools are laid out for the camera to assess. Had the camera not already lingered over the men at their work, you might be tempted to believe that these implements are used in uncovering fossils rather than in making them.

“Before History” is the public delivery system for the 2015 Abraaj Group Art Prize. It’s the seventh year that the Dubai-based private equity firm, and Art Dubai partner, has funded the award.

It’s not a prize for finished work but takes the form of a commission on the basis of artists’ project applications, which are sieved through AGAP’s selection committee, accepting submissions from artists from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia region.

This model has proven mutable over the years. At first it was awarded to three artist-curator teams, but was later rejigged for five artists and a single curator. For its seventh year, Abraaj decided it wanted to commission work from a single winning artist working with a curator – this year U.K.-based Omar Kholeif.

“Lying Stones,” Barrada’s second work, is comprised of a pair of heart-shaped “fossils” enclosed within a glass-topped vitrine. Each of the Valentine-like stones has been arrayed to resemble a pair of small jewellery boxes, their lids removed to reveal the forms of a pair of scorpions and a wee trilobite within.

“Yto has asked me to not say whether they’re real nor not,” Kholeif remarked during Tuesday’s press walk-through, “but to say that they come from her private collection of fossils, which she’s been compiling extensively.”

“Lying Stones” marked the start of Barrada’s current palaeontology-themed project, Kholeif continued, noting that the artist expects that these two works will be only the first in a long-term process of research and production.

With “Lying Stones,” he recalled, Barrada “wanted to think particularly about the materiality of these objects and their placement in museums around the world, what it meant to have these objects placed in institutions and whether it mattered that they’re real or not.”

Complementing Barrada’s two works, and ensuring that “Before History” resembles a proper exhibition, are older pieces by the three artists shortlisted for this year’s Abraaj prize – Mounira Al Solh, Sarnath Banerjee and Setareh Shahbazi.

Solh’s “Mute Tongue,” 2010/15 takes 19 Arabic-language proverbs, first enacted by Croatian performance artist Sinisa Labrovic, then shown onscreen as an intertitle. As it was originally conceived, Solh’s work was shown as a series of vignettes, each on its own small screen. For “Before History,” the work is projected as a single-channel video on larger format.

“Temporary Autonomous Zones,” 2012, by artist, graphic novelist and zine publisher Sarnath Banerjee, takes its cue from a book of the same title by Hakim Bey. Banerjee appropriates the name Pirate’s Island as a way of saying that pirates and islands are among the few spaces of contemplation left to us.

The photo series “Spectral Days,” 2013, by Berlin-based Iranian (once Beiruti) artist Setareh Shahbazi is based upon a series of family photos. She’s altered them, however, using an elaborate process of photo manipulation and printing to deracinate them, so the series’ individual photos range from pop art to surrealism to something sweetly nostalgic.

“The idea of ‘Before History,’” Kholeif remarked, “came from the idea of artists working with time, layering time, excavating into histories and stories, adopting them and [using them to] tell their own personal narratives ... creating new meanings for the material that they’ve found.”

This curatorial brief obviously speaks to some of these five works better than others. Assessing “Before History” as an exhibition, Shahbazi’s work is probably shown to better advantage than those of the other shortlisted artists.

Enclosed within a single vitrine, the samples selected from Banerjee’s witty work seem most alienated from their current setting. Anyone familiar with the original 19-channel version of Solh’s piece, and the anarchic perusal of the work it invited, may find the one-channel version static and regimented by comparison.

Barrada’s work is the centrepiece of “Before History,” of course. Several individuals – whose tastes in art are evidently more aesthetic – emerged from the show’s opening to confide that they found “Faux Départ” more like boring documentary than art.

But for those who like art that enters through the brain, “Faux Départ” provokes several intriguing questions – not least how unassailably public readings of the world is entangled in narrative, and commerce.

“Before History” is up at Art Dubai through March 21. For more information on the Abraaj Prize, see

www.abraajgroupartprize.com.

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